[atlaw]

Education in rudimentary literary devices, employed for centuries by good and bad novelists alike, has apparently been eliminated from the curriculum. Sad.

I suppose the word "novel" itself will soon be a head-scratcher, relegated to the depths of the thesaurus as an oddity that pre-dated the rise of truthiness and television news.

[AmishDude]

Well, I am certainly familiar with the rhetorical device of accusing your opponent of ignorance or stupidity.

So, what you are saying is that when Dan Brown writes in the front of his "novel" that "all this crap is true" he is just using a "literary device"?

What about when he continues to maintain that polite fiction in interviews?