Aporia -- Talking about not being able to talk about something: "I can't tell you how often writers use aporia."
Apostrophe -- (not to be confused with the punctuation mark): addressing someone or some abstraction that is not physically present: "Oh, Death, be not proud" (John Donne). "Ah, Mr. Newton, you would be pleased to see how far we have progressed in physics."
Erotema -- asking a rhetorical question to the reader: "What should honest citizens do?"
Hyperbole -- exaggeration: "His thundering shout could split rocks." Or, "Yo' mama's so fat. . . ."
Irony -- Verbal irony is the trope when a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words ostensibly express. Often this sort of irony is plainly sarcastic in the eyes of the reader, but the characters listening in the story may not realize the speaker's sarcasm as quickly as the readers do. Dramatic irony and Situational irony are not actually tropes.
Litotes -- (especially popular in Old English) is a type of meiosis (intentional underexaggeration) in which the writer uses a statement in the negative to create the effect: "You know, Einstein is not a bad mathematician." (i.e., Einstein is a good mathematician.)
Metonymy -- using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea: CROWN for royalty; the PEN is mightier than the SWORD. "If we cannot strike offenders in the heart, let us strike them in the wallet." We use metonymy in everyday speech when we refer to the entire movie-making industry as Hollywood, or when we refer to the collective decisions of the United States government as Washington, or the White House.
Metaphor -- when something is something else: the ladder of success (i.e, success is a ladder). "Carthage was a beehive of buzzing workers." Or, "This is your brain on drugs."
Onomatopoeia -- echoic words or words that create an auditory effective similar to the sound they represent: Buzz; Click; Rattle; Clatter; Squish; Grunt.
Oxymoron -- (plural oxymora also called Paradox)-- Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense. Examples of oxymora include jumbo shrimp, sophisticated rednecks, and military intelligence. The best oxymora seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. For instance, "without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous oxymoron: "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32).
Personification -- giving human qualities to inanimate objects: "The ground thirsts for rain; the wind whispered secrets to us."
Puns -- A pun twists the meaning of words. Homonymic Puns -- "Johnny B. Good" is a pun for "Johnny be good." Sound similarities -- "Casting perils before swains" (instead of "pearls before swine").
Simile -- when something is like something else: "Her skin was like alabaster." "He was as unpleasant as a venereal disease."
Synecdoche -- using a part of a physical object to represent the whole object: "Twenty eyes watched our every move" (i.e., ten people watched our every move). "A hungry stomach has no ears" (La Fontaine).
Synęsthesia -- Mixing one type of sensory input with another in an impossible way, such as speaking of how a color sounds, or how a smell looks: "The scent of the rose rang like a bell through the garden." "I caressed the darkness with cool fingers."
Zeugma -- one verb using different objects. If this changes the verb's initial meaning, the zeugma is sometimes called syllepsis: "If we don't hang together, we shall hang separately" (Ben Franklin). "The queen of England sometimes takes advice in that chamber, and sometimes tea." ". . . losing her heart or her necklace at the ball" (Alexander Pope). "She exhausted both her audience and her repertoire."