Schemes and Tropes: A Plain-English Guide to Figures of Speech

Every writer uses figures of speech, whether they know the names or not. When a pastor repeats the same phrase at the start of every point, or calls the church "a family," they are using tools that teachers of rhetoric have named and studied for more than two thousand years.

Figures of speech are some of the clearest fingerprints in a writer's voice. One author leans on metaphor. Another builds rhythm through repetition. Another almost never uses either. Knowing the names helps you notice your own habits, and helps an editor protect them.

Two families: schemes and tropes

Silva Rhetoricae, an online guide to rhetoric by Gideon O. Burton of Brigham Young University, sorts the figures into two families.

• A scheme is an artful change in the ordinary arrangement of words. Repetition and balance are schemes.
• A trope is an artful change in the ordinary meaning of a word. Metaphor and simile are tropes.

Put simply, schemes play with the shape of a sentence. Tropes play with what the words mean.

The examples below come from the Bible, quoted in the English Standard Version (ESV). Scripture is full of these figures, which is one reason its words are so easy to remember.

Schemes: playing with arrangement

Anaphora

Anaphora is the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of clauses, sentences, or lines. The Beatitudes are a famous example:

> "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." (Matthew 5:3–5, ESV)

Anaphora builds rhythm and makes a passage easy to remember. Preachers use it naturally, because listeners can hear the structure.

Parallelism

Parallelism means giving related words, phrases, or clauses the same structure. Hebrew poetry is full of it:

> "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." (Psalm 119:105, ESV)

The two halves of the verse match each other, and the second deepens the first.

Tricolon

A tricolon is a series of three parallel parts. Strictly speaking, the parts should be close to the same length. In everyday teaching, people use the word for any memorable group of three:

> "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." (1 Corinthians 13:13, ESV)

Groups of three feel complete. Many writers reach for them without thinking.

Antithesis

Antithesis sets contrasting words or ideas side by side, often in matching structure. It is a favorite of teachers, because contrast makes a point clear: light and darkness, flesh and spirit, the old life and the new.

Chiasmus

Chiasmus repeats ideas or structures in reverse order, making an A-B-B-A pattern. Jesus used this shape when He said:

> "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." (Mark 2:27, ESV)

Sabbath, man; man, Sabbath. Rhetoric scholars sometimes use a narrower name, antimetabole, when the very same words come back in reverse, as they do here. The crossing pattern makes the saying stick in the mind.

Tropes: playing with meaning

Metaphor

A metaphor compares two things by speaking of one as if it were the other:

> "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want." (Psalm 23:1, ESV)

The psalm says God is a shepherd, and the whole psalm unfolds from that picture.

Simile

A simile makes the comparison openly, usually with "like" or "as":

> "He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season." (Psalm 1:3, ESV)

Similes are gentler than metaphors. They invite the reader to see the likeness while keeping the two things distinct.

Analogy

An analogy is a comparison carried further, used to explain or argue. When Jesus says, "I am the vine; you are the branches" (John 15:5, ESV), and then goes on to speak of abiding and bearing fruit, the image becomes a whole way of understanding the Christian life.

Litotes

Litotes is deliberate understatement, often made by denying the opposite. When Paul told the Roman officer he was "a citizen of no obscure city" (Acts 21:39, ESV), he meant that Tarsus was an important city. Silva Rhetoricae notes that the Rhetorica ad Herennium suggests litotes as a way to sound modest and win an audience's favor.

Figures of sound

Some figures work on the ear more than the mind.

• Alliteration repeats the same sound in nearby words, usually the first consonant: "a lamp ... and a light."
• Assonance repeats similar vowel sounds in nearby stressed syllables.
• Consonance repeats consonant sounds, often at the ends of words. Silva Rhetoricae points out that this term belongs more to modern poetry than to classical rhetoric.

Why this matters for your voice

You can write well without memorizing these terms. Many gifted preachers and storytellers have never heard the word "anaphora." Still, every author has a pattern. Some writers love contrast. Some think in pictures. Some build every chapter around a group of three.

At Legacy Publishing, we notice those patterns when we study an author's writing and speaking. If you are a writer who naturally repeats a phrase for effect, we keep that repetition in your book. If you rarely use metaphor, we keep metaphor rare in your chapters too. Our job is to lead your book toward the clearest, strongest version of the voice you already have.

Try this: read a page of your own writing and circle every comparison and every repeated phrase. You may discover a signature you never knew you had.