Narrative, Rhetoric & Writing

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Abstractions about constructing and interpreting narratives and rhetorical acts. They include plot, exposition, focalization, parable and oral history, figurative and invitational rhetoric, critical stance, procedural persuasion, puns, tellability, writing practice, and creative blockage.

24 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Apostrophe (figure of speech) — A rhetorical turn in which a speaker breaks from the current audience to address an absent person, abstract idea or inanimate entity directly.
• Epilogue — A concluding section situated after a narrative’s main action that supplies closure, later consequences or a bridge to subsequent installments from within the represented world.
• Exposition (narrative) — Background information inserted into a narrative so readers can understand its setting, characters, prior events or governing context.
• Flashing arrow — A film and television foreshadowing device that conspicuously directs audience attention to an object or situation needed later in the plot.
• Focalisation — The narratological relation determining through whose perceptual, cognitive, or informational position narrative events are selected and presented.
• Hypotyposis — A rhetorical figure that renders a scene so vivid, animated and immediate that an audience seems to witness it.
• Hypsos — The Longinian rhetorical sublime: a heightening of discourse that transports an audience through grandeur, intensity, and a mixed response of awe, astonishment, attraction, and fear.
• Invective — Abusive or denunciatory language used rhetorically to blame, censure, discredit or wound a target.
• Invitational rhetoric — A rhetorical theory seeking mutual understanding through equality, immanent value and self-determination rather than aiming primarily to change the audience.
• Joke — A bounded humorous communication that establishes an interpretive frame and then uses a punch line, incongruity, wordplay, reversal, exaggeration, or anti-climax to trigger amusement or laughter.
• Metanoia (rhetoric) — A rhetorical self-correction that retracts or qualifies a just-made expression and replaces it with a stronger, weaker or more precise one.
• Narreme — A minimal functional unit of narrative structure defined by its contribution to an event, state, transition, or relation in a story rather than by sentence length.
• Oral history — A planned, recorded interview practice that creates, preserves and interprets first-person accounts of past experience as historically situated evidence shaped by memory, narration and interviewer–participant interaction.
• Parable — A concise didactic narrative that places a concrete human situation alongside a moral, spiritual, or practical principle so interpretation of the story carries an instructive lesson.
• Plot (narrative) — The organized sequence and causal arrangement of events in a narrative.
• Posthumous narrative — Let a character narrate from a position established as after that character's death, creating an impossible or conventionally licensed retrospective voice with expanded temporal knowledge.
• Procedural rhetoric — Persuasion through rule-governed processes and simulations that make claims by modeling how a system works.
• Racial rhetorical criticism — A rhetorical-critical approach that analyzes how racial histories, oppression, and logics shape discourse while treating race itself as rhetorically constructed.
• Rhetorical stance — Coordinate a communicator's projected persona, treatment of a subject, relation to an audience, purpose, tone, and available appeals so a message adopts a deliberate position fitted to its rhetorical situation.
• Tellability — The context-dependent quality that makes an event or sequence sufficiently remarkable, consequential and audience-relevant to warrant narration.
• Transpositional pun — A wordplay form that swaps elements of a familiar phrase so the altered expression becomes a comic redefinition of an otherwise unrelated word.
• Wooden iron — A proverbial oxymoron used in philosophical polemic to characterize a phrase or position as internally contradictory.
• Writer's block — A nonmedical state of sustained difficulty initiating or continuing writing despite an intention and opportunity to write.
• Writing process — The recursive set of cognitive, social and material activities through which a writer develops, composes, revises and delivers a text.