Rhetorical devices

Allusion and direct references

In his “Make Good Art” speech, Neil Gaiman uses different allusions or direct references. For example, when he talks about the importance of making mistakes, Gaiman says he “once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing the A and the O, and [he] thought, “Coraline looks like a real name…” (ll. 107-109). Here, Gaiman is alluding to the popular children’s book called Coraline that he published in 2002, which won numerous awards and was later adapted into a movie. In this way, the allusion helps Gaiman show how a mistake he made was useful to him and became the name of a character and the title of a best-selling book. 

Gaiman also directly refers to some of his other works, such as the comic book series Sandman and the novel Good Omens: “King ...