Orientation
Site Guide
What each room is for, how the pages work, and where your data lives.
The four rooms
The reference. Every device — 84 of them in 9 families — with plain-language definitions, canonical examples, its confusable neighbours, and every excerpt the Reader contains. At the bottom: the Gallery of Errors, eight specimens of bad rhetoric annotated with the same care as the masterpieces.
196 passages, each annotated device by device. Search the full text, arrange by era, author, or density, or follow a curated reading trail.
The quiz. Name devices in real excerpts, spot excerpts for a named device, or match definitions. Your accuracy per family is tracked and steers what comes next. Also here: the Device Forge, where you write devices and detectors verify them, and the printable paper quiz for classrooms.
Fifty speaking drills for two people — or one, with solo mode auto-dealing the director's signals. The Prompt Deck deals a topic, an audience, and a constraint for warm-ups.
The Rhetoric Course sequences readings, quizzes, and drills over ten weeks, with saved progress.
On a passage page
- Hover a marked phrase to see its device; click to pin the card. The colored chips toggle whole families of underlines.
- Walk through it (on showcase passages) steps through the devices one at a time, in teaching order.
- Test yourself hides the annotations and lets you mark the words you think are doing rhetorical work, then scores you against the real spans.
- Print handout produces a clean one-page version with a device key — made for teaching.
- Pinning writes the URL. Copy it and the link opens the passage with that device highlighted.
- Showcase pages also carry a Sentence Architecture panel diagramming a famous sentence clause by clause.
In the School
- New here? The placement (two questions per family) maps where you stand and seeds the scoreboard.
- Misses are collected. The "Review my misses" button re-quizzes exactly what you got wrong; two correct answers retire a miss.
- Quiz setups live in the URL, so a particular configuration can be bookmarked or sent to someone else.
- Every device page has a drill button scoped to that device and its confusable neighbours.
Finding things
- Ctrl+K (⌘K on a Mac) — or the magnifier in the header — opens quick search over every passage, device, and drill, from any page.
- The Reader index has full-text search and a device filter: every passage containing, say, chiasmus.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Ctrl+K | Quick search, anywhere |
| 1–4 | Answer a quiz question |
| Enter | Next question, after answering |
| Esc | Close a card, dialog, or pinned device |
| Ctrl+Enter | Check your work, in the Forge |
Your data
Everything the site remembers about you — quiz record, mistakes deck, course and drill progress — lives in this browser and nowhere else. Nothing is sent anywhere. The gear icon in the header exports it all to a file, restores from one, replays the welcome tour, or wipes the slate.