If ever there was a cure for writer’s block, Mark Forsyth’s THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE comes as close as a cutthroat razor.
As William Shakespeare, writing as Thomas Edison, opined: 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, and Forsyth’s tome certainly takes the sweat out of turning the perfect English phrase.
In a nut sack, THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE advocates a return to rhetoric, a renaissance of words wrought right, written or spoken.
It’s a recipe book of tools, techniques, tricks and terminology to turn substance into style, the banal into the beautiful.
Made up of a preface, thirty nine chapters, a peroration, an epilogue, and suggestions for further reading, THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE delves the delights of alliteration through to zeugma, the funny figure of rhetoric that doesn’t work awfully well in English but can cream the opposition in a Scrabble squabble.
Study of THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE will have you shadowing Shakespeare in any of his guises whether writing as Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere or some other charlatan, chameleon character. Indeed, you may become Shakespeare, the only writer to have rivalled Shakespeare.
The pedant author pulls the pedestal from the Bard and persuades readers to ascend, jostling for the pentameter, epistrophe, epizeuxis, paradox, prolepsis and periodic sentences.
Like his two previous books, The Etymologicon and The Horologicon, THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE pays worship to the word, being a benediction to the bon mot, an adoration to diacope, high praise for the phrase.
Read it and reap.
