An investigation into rhetorical devices in TED talks
Abstract
The increasing popularity of TED as an idea-distributing platform has drawn its sharable and highly sophisticated presentations to the attention of recent research efforts, especially those focusing on TED’s educational values. Keeping abreast of this trend, the researchers aimed to study the range and the frequencies of rhetorical figures used in TED talks, and thus make some broad generalizations on the prominent features of those figures. With this end in mind, the researchers have identif ied the rhetorical devices in 45 TED talks and analyze their noticeable features. At the same time, the study also resorts to quantitative method, which enables the researcher s to gain a general picture of the occurrence frequencies of those rhetorical figures. The results reveal that TED presenters incline to use figures of speech, especially figures of repetition such as anaphora and anadiplosis , compared with the other two devices, namely figures of thought and tropes .