Mark Forsyth was born a scientist. I always wanted to look at poem in a more rigorous way, not in the sort of arty-fairy sort of thing, but in a properly see what's going on here. Why is Shakespeare better than other writers? Why is this a good poem, not that one? What's actually going on there?1
He learned about English verse forms — iambic pentameter and the prosodic substrate. Then he discovered the figures of rhetoric. That there were these formulas that had been identified two and a half thousand years ago. And I wanted to find out about it. And I couldn't find any books on English rhetoric. Or almost none. There's one written in the early 20th century by a nun. There's one from the 1580s by Puttenham. But there's almost nothing.1
So he wrote The Elements of Eloquence — the book he wanted to read when he was 16. The methodology is one sentence: the techniques and the formulas are there and they're useful and they're waiting to be used.1 The reader's job is to internalize the formulas and deploy them on demand.
The Greek rhetorical taxonomy (progressio, diacope, chiasmus, anaphora, epistrophe, tricolon, anadiplosis, polyptoton, isocolon, periodic sentence, adynaton, and others) catalogs specific sentence-architectures that produce specific cognitive effects in audiences. The formulas are not stylistic decoration. They are operationally-named techniques that make sentences memorable, persuasive, or rhythmically irresistible — by fitting specific shapes the brain has receptors for.
Perell crystallizes the mechanism: our minds have memory receptors in certain shapes, and what you're doing when you're writing is using these little rhetorical tactics to shape our words and ideas so that they fit into the slot of the human brain.1 Forsyth agrees: that's exactly it. Yes. That's a very good way of putting it. I've been talking about this book for years and I've never thought about it that well.
The slot-and-receptor framing is what makes the figures load-bearing rather than ornamental. Sentences that fit the slots stick. Sentences that don't fit slide off. The writer who knows the slots can engineer for stickiness; the writer who doesn't will produce sentences that are correct but unmemorable.
Forsyth blames the Romantics for the loss. I think a lot of it is the desire to see writing as being Romantic. That's the big thing — when the Romantics came in, writing was meant to be all passion and stuff, and that you shouldn't have been calculating whilst writing.1
The Romantic project displaced the rhetoric-as-craft tradition by reframing craft as opposed to passion. Calculated sentence-engineering became, in the Romantic frame, evidence of insincerity — the real writer is moved, not strategic. The figures retreated to Latin classrooms and ancient-Greek scholarship. Working writers stopped using their formal names.
But the figures didn't actually disappear. They went underground. The Romantics use the figures of rhetoric loads. The figures are everywhere in advertising, politics, Bible verses, Shakespeare, pop lyrics, screenwriting. What was lost was not the practice; what was lost was the named conscious practice. The figures became invisible because they lost their names — and what we cannot name, we cannot teach.
Forsyth's project is to restore the names, demonstrate the working examples, and let the writer make the formulas conscious. The McCartney British Library exhibit reveals McCartney inserting anadiplosis deliberately into draft lyrics without knowing the Greek term. I don't know if Paul McCartney even knows what the word anadiplosis is, but he knows how to use it.1 Great writers use the figures intuitively; the deliberate-practice writer can use them consciously by learning the names — or, better, by learning the formulas without bothering with the names.
Forsyth keeps the figures in his head. But when Perell asks if writers should keep a cheat sheet, Forsyth's answer is yes. I mean, essentially my book is a big cheat sheet.1
His final advice, given as the conversation closes: None of these names — anadiplosis, chiasmus — these mean nothing to me. None of them need to be remembered. What I do is I came up with little names for myself and then I have a cheat sheet with a few examples and some bullet points. And then what I can do is if I'm trying to insert one, I can just look at the cheat sheet... because the names of these — they sound kind of academic. They don't really matter. It's the formulas and the tactics that really make the difference.1
The Greek names are the hardest part of the methodology and the least important. The writer can use English-language renamings (verbal sandwich for diacope; power of three for tricolon; clause-chain for anadiplosis) and lose nothing. The formulas matter. The names are scaffolding.
How does the writer practice the figures? Forsyth: I think about writing the same way [as jazz musicians]. Jazz musicians spent ages and ages practicing — learning scales and different harmonic techniques and very, very long, boring practice. And then they go out on stage and they improvise, and the improvisation is just coming off the top of their head — but it's coming off a very, very well-trained head, if you see what I mean.1
The figures are scales. The writer practices them off-stage. When the writer is drafting under deadline, the figures show up automatically because the well-trained head produces them. The figures stop being conscious techniques to deploy and start being part of the writer's natural production.
This requires repetitive practice. Forsyth recommends iambic-pentameter improvisation as scales-practice: just improvise nonsense. The chair is on the carpet in the room. That's iambic pentameter. It doesn't need to be deep and meaningful... you can walk down the street saying anything. And then quite quickly you'll just be able to talk in them basically. And if you can do that, and then make them rhyme, then coming back at writing prose is just easy.1 The same principle applies to the rhetorical figures: practice the form off-stage; deploy in-stage.
Forsyth and Bharata's thirty-six lakshanas converge on the principle that rhetorical figures form a taxonomy that can be taught and practiced. Both traditions catalog specific sentence-architectures with named formulas. The split is in cultural lineage (Greek vs Sanskrit) and in current usage (Sanskrit lakshanas remain in Indian classical-arts pedagogy; Greek figures have been largely lost in Western writing pedagogy). The convergence reveals that the figures-taxonomy approach to rhetoric is a culturally-widespread craft-organizing structure that the modern Western literary tradition has uniquely neglected.
Forsyth diverges from Karlsson's body-state-transmission essayism on whether sentences should be engineered or summoned. Karlsson's method treats sentences as emergent from body-incubation; Forsyth's method treats sentences as engineered through formula-application. The split is real: two genuinely different theories of how prose comes into being. Both produce excellent writing — but a Karlsson-style writer who tries to formula-engineer will produce mechanical prose, and a Forsyth-style writer who tries to wait for body-summoning may produce nothing on deadline.
Forsyth's rhetorical-figures methodology maps onto two adjacent domains where the same formula-as-cognitive-receptor principle appears: behavioral-mechanics (the persuasion-engineer's taxonomy of named influence techniques) and creative-practice (the Sanskrit aesthetic theory tradition of named rhetorical figures).
Behavioral-Mechanics: Cialdini Influence Principles Taxonomy — Robert Cialdini and the broader behavioral-influence tradition has produced taxonomies of named persuasion techniques (reciprocity, commitment-consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, unity). The taxonomies serve the same function as the rhetorical-figures taxonomy: name the technique, demonstrate working examples, let the practitioner deploy consciously. The structural identity: both crafts treat the named-formula taxonomy as the right pedagogical form because the alternative (learning techniques without names) is structurally untransmissible across practitioners. The insight neither domain generates alone: Cialdini and Forsyth are doing the same pedagogical project in different domains — and the influence-tradition has been more successful at popularizing its taxonomy than the literary tradition has been at re-popularizing the rhetorical figures. Writers can learn from how Cialdini made dry academic taxonomy accessible to working practitioners. The Cialdini-style trade-book approach to rhetorical figures has not yet been written; The Elements of Eloquence is the closest existing instance.
Creative-Practice (Sanskrit Aesthetics): The Four Alaṃkāras — Figures of Speech (Nāṭyaśāstra) and The Thirty-Six Lakshanas — the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition catalogs four major figures of speech (alaṃkāras) and thirty-six rhetorical features (lakshanas) in the Nāṭyaśāstra. The taxonomy has remained continuously available in Indian classical-arts pedagogy across two millennia. Forsyth's Western project of restoring the Greek-rhetorical-figures taxonomy is structurally identical to what Indian aesthetic theory never lost. The structural identity: both crafts identify the rhetorical-figure taxonomy as load-bearing pedagogy; the Indian tradition preserved it; the Western tradition forgot it and is now slowly recovering it. The insight neither domain generates alone: Forsyth's project is the Western recovery of a craft-organizing principle that classical Indian aesthetics never abandoned. The Western writer who has studied the alaṃkāras and lakshanas has access to a richer figures-taxonomy than the Greek tradition alone provides. The cross-tradition synthesis (Greek + Sanskrit rhetorical-figures) is an underexploited pedagogical resource.
A third connection worth marking: Forsyth's figures-as-memory-slots framing has structural similarity to Bilton's character-anchor-traits — both exploit the cognitive principle that memory receptors have shapes and that fitting content to the shapes produces retention.
The Sharpest Implication
If the rhetorical-figures taxonomy was a load-bearing pedagogy that the Western literary tradition let lapse for two centuries, then most working writers today are operating without explicit knowledge of techniques that their pre-Romantic predecessors used as common craft — and the consequence is prose that fits the cognitive receptors by accident or not at all, rather than by craft. The uncomfortable implication: the literary-craft pedagogy gap between 1750 and 2025 is structural, not generational, and writers who acquire the rhetorical-figures knowledge today are acquiring a craft-tool their professors did not have. The methodology is not nostalgic recovery; it is craft-restoration that working writers can deploy immediately and that the publishing-and-reviewing infrastructure does not yet recognize as a recovered competence.
Generative Questions