Teaching blog and column writing skills is a new treat for me! A bit challenging in English, though… But since I’m teaching at the Green Summer University in Frankfurt (Oder, nearly in Poland), it’s the chosen lingua franca. After many training sessions about serious texts, policy memos, press releases etc., this session is about playing with language. Forget the laws of structure, forget the obligatory W’s in the title: have an opinion and have fun with it.
The toolkit is ancient: rhetorical devices the Greeks came up with some 2400 years ago. When they invented democracy, dressed in their white sheets, pacing the Stoa. True, democracy was limited to the men. To those who were born in Athens. To those who were not a slave. But still, it was a start. For democracy, and for a collection of great ways to reach your audience: hyperboles, metaphores, anaphores, you name it.
The Greeks are not that popular at the moment, Eurowisely spoken. But we have to give their ancestors the credits for the rhetorical toolkit we still use today.
Here’s the prezi!
