Style Academy #5

Isaac Ford

Kaleigh Spooner

Section 23

Style Academy #5

            For my final style academy assignment, I wanted to learn about something that was completely new to me.  So when I was scrolling through the Style Academy website and I saw the section on “Tropes and Schemes”, I knew that that was the one for me.  I had heard of a scheme before, but had no idea what a trope was, so this style academy assignment was very beneficial for me.  From the instruction, I learned that a trope is when you turn the meaning of words to mean something else.  An example he gave in the video was from the movie Forest Gump, “Life is like a box of chocolates.”  He explains that tropes are commonly achieved through the use of metaphors and similes.  In this example, the speaker is making a connection between two unrelated things – life and a box of chocolates.  So anytime someone makes a play on words to change the meaning, it is a trope.

            A scheme is something similar but at the same time different.  A scheme is how you play wit the way words appear in the text.  There are four ways to do that; Repetition, Balance, Omission, and Transposition.  The quote by Winston Churchill we went over in class was an example he gave to show repetition – repeating the phrase “we shall” over and over again.  Schemes are much more common in writing than I had realized, and help enhance rhetorical moves.  I never realized but I have used some aspects of schemes in my writing for a long time.  We had an activity to do where he gave a sentence and we had to identify it it was a trope or a scheme.  Two examples of those sentences are these:

            Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. 

            More Boots on the Ground for Peace

The first sentence is an example of a scheme.  It uses the omission or the word “and” to create a different effect in the mind of the reader.  The second sentence is an example of a trope because of the play on the word “boots”.  In this sentence, the word “boots” is used to represent all the troops in general and not actually boots. 

            Before watching this video, I wouldn’t have had any idea as to what those two things were, but now I am able to accurately define and identify each one.