Epanorthosis
A figure in which the speaker corrects or intensifies a word just used, as if catching themselves in a weaker choice.
Epanorthosis (Greek 'setting straight again') is the figure of self-correction: the speaker names a word, then immediately replaces it with a stronger, weaker, or more precise one, in full view of the audience. 'I was surprised — no, astonished — to hear it.' The correction is not really a correction; it is a two-stage delivery that lets the second word land harder because the first has cleared the space for it.
The figure is old. Cicero uses it constantly, and the rhetoricians of the Renaissance treated it as one of the signature devices of vehement speech. It survives in modern prose because it mimics the actual movement of thought under pressure: the speaker seems to be feeling for the right word in real time, and the audience is invited into the search.
There are two families of epanorthosis. In the intensifying kind, the second word is stronger than the first ('a mistake — a catastrophe'); in the qualifying kind, the second word is weaker or more careful ('a lie — or, to be fair, an evasion'). The first is a device of passion, the second a device of honesty; both work by making the correction audible.
Common mistake: using epanorthosis when a plain word choice would do. The figure earns its keep only if the first word is a plausible first choice; if it obviously exists only to be replaced, the correction reads as a stage trick and the second word loses the force the figure was meant to give it.
“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit that from her working all his visage wanned, tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, a broken voice, and his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba!”
Keep reading the glossary
The repetition of a word within a short passage, with a different meaning each time.
A rhetorical expression of genuine or feigned doubt about how to proceed — the speaker stops to wonder aloud.
An explicit definition, mid-argument, of a term the speaker will then rely on — narrowing the sense to prevent ambiguity.
A rhetorical figure in which the speaker asks a question and immediately answers it.