Visiting Professor of Communication John Adams is inviting Hamilton alumni and students with an interest in speeches, rhetoric or language to join him and his students on The Daily Trope, a blog devoted to figures of speech and the rhetorical tropes and schemes on which public speaking skills are built.
Created for a speechwriting class, the blog offers a new rhetorical device each day, along with a definition and an example; students then compose and post their own examples, and alumni who visit the site are invited to do the same. The Sept. 30 offering, for example:
"Periphrasis (per-if'-ra-sis): The substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a proper name (a species of circumlocution); or, conversely, the use of a proper name as a shorthand to stand for qualities associated with it."
To which a student responded with this example: "I may have gotten a little carried away, but I didn't go Howard Dean on the crowd."
