Sermocinatio
Inventing speech for a real or imagined person to reveal their character.
Sermocinatio puts words in someone's mouth for rhetorical effect: the speaker quotes what a person would say, in the manner they would say it, without claiming the words were actually uttered.
The Roman handbooks treated it as a characterisation device. Style carries the argument — vocabulary, hesitation, and register are chosen to show the speaker's mind more efficiently than description could.
It is closely related to ethopoeia and prosopopoeia; the practical difference is that sermocinatio focuses on the invented speech itself rather than on assuming another's identity wholesale.
Common mistake: letting invented speech be mistaken for a quotation. Marked framings such as "one might say" or "you can hear the reply" keep the invention visible, and lifted out of context an unmarked example becomes a fabricated quote.
“And the manager says, well, nobody told me, nobody ever tells me anything, and anyway it was Friday.”
Keep reading the glossary
A figure in which the speaker gives voice to an absent, dead, or non-human entity, letting it speak in the first person.
Speaking in another person's character, imitating their manner of thought and speech.
A rhetorical figure in which the speaker asks a question and immediately answers it.
The short attributive phrase — 'she said', 'he replied' — that identifies the speaker of a line of quoted dialogue.