"rhetorical ploy" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a technique used to persuade an audience, usually by appealing to emotion or personal beliefs. For example: "The politician's use of a rhetorical ploy to appeal to the fears of the electorate proved successful."
It has become increasingly clear that this is not a mere rhetorical ploy but a distinction with a difference.
Of course, we cannot know in an given case whether this is sincere or merely a rhetorical ploy.
You can kill all them.' " Williams is equally convincing in both roles: the guy pointing out a rhetorical ploy and the guy — the "nigga" — falling for it.
This is not pie-in-the-sky lefty logic, a rhetorical ploy aimed at refocusing foreign policy attention back onto the domestic sphere, security implications be damned.
You can kill all them.' " Williams is equally convincing in both roles: the guy pointing out a rhetorical ploy and the guy the "nigga"—falling for it.
That rhetorical ploy, which has divided members of the Federalist Society, links those who have opposed the Bush administration on national security issues to al-Qaida 9. Cheney's attack video is a silly slur that represents a new low in our polarized national politics.
(Steven Soderbergh, in his famous speech at the 2013 San Francisco Film Festival, sketched the rhetorical ploys of the studio pitch).
In Freud's rhetorical ploys, he's always pitting himself against creative writers, which is why Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, for instance, took the bait and bristled accordingly.
Some so-called fallacies are not mistakes in reasoning but rather illicit rhetorical ploys, such as appeals to pity (traditionally called the fallacy of ad misericordiam), to authority (ad verecundiam), or to popular opinion (ad populum).
In Socratic style, he leads the intrepid and presumably naive group expertly through the minefields of philosophical errors and rhetorical ploys – the first half of the book – until they, and we his readers, are judged ready to join him, via a long detour into computer programming, in an assault on his traditional opponents.
This also applies to clear rhetorical ploys, such as obviously false or hyperbolic statements.
