Rhetorical Devices Syntactical Devices Alliteration - the repetition of initial consonant sounds in a series of words Concession - briefly acknowledging the counterargument Rhetorical Questions - questions for effect in proving a point Parallelism - one or more sentences with similar clauses or phrases with the same grammatical structure Anaphora - repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a sentence Epistrophe - the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of a sentence Which rhetorical device is used in the following passage from "Speech in the Convention" by Benjamin Franklin? "For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views." alliteration parallelism rhetorical question

Answer 1

The rhetorical device used in the passage from "Speech in the Convention" by Benjamin Franklin is parallelism.

In this passage, the phrase "their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views" employs a similar grammatical structure in listing different aspects. This structured repetition of "their" followed by different nouns highlights the various negative traits that come with assembling a group of individuals.