Rhetorical Structures — The Meaning of Life: A Question Worth Asking?
Grammar: Rhetorical structures: antithesis, periodic sentences, and apposition
Free ESL grammar exercise on rhetorical structures themed around the meaning of life: a question worth asking?. Printable worksheet from classplan.ai.
What's on this worksheet
A Level 6 (proficiency) ESL grammar exercise on psychology, practising rhetorical structures: antithesis, periodic sentences, and apposition. The worksheet has a short reading excerpt, a grammar reference and graded practice items.
From the reading
Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in Twilight of the Idols in 1888, argued that making value judgements about life was logically impossible. Not merely difficult, but fundamentally self-defeating — anyone who tries is both a party to the dispute and its judge.
Grammar: Rhetorical Structures
- Antithesis
- Two contrasting ideas placed side by side for effect. It is not the destination that defines us, but the journey. — balance creates emphasis.
- Periodic sentence
- The key idea is delayed until the end, building tension. If no one chose to be born, and no one can see the end, how can anyone judge the middle?
Sample items
- Nietzsche, ______, published his most provocative ideas in the late nineteenth century.
- It is not the question itself that troubles us, but ______.
- If language shapes every thought we have, and grammar smuggles in assumptions of order, ______.
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