Study on the Sense of Humor and Rhetorical Devices of Bill Bryson from "Florence" (Volume 2) There are plenty of examples of this kind of humor and rhetorical devices in "Florence". Hyperbole is the most common rhetorical device, and it is also the most common way to show a typical sense of hilarious American humor marked by exaggeration. For example, Bryson said he took the slowest train to Florence; he saw people moving across Europe at the speed of a laser; he was shown to room by a 112-year-old porter who escorted me into the world’s slowest lift and from whom I learned, during the course of our two-day ascent to the fifth floor. These sentences are trying to express typical “Brysonian” exaggeration which helps bring us into his world of humor. Even though British humor has a deep impact on his writing style, Bryson often decorates his travel articles with his Americanness, and we can see from this essay, he features American humor. When it comes to humor, British humor reaches a level of seriousness but it doesn’t mean British humor is more noble; while American humor is more straightforward, and it’s easier to understand so readers are more relaxed and think is funnier. In other words, American humor is just like a situation that a Chinese student in class, who doesn’t like English, answers the teacher’s question about why he never learned English well, and the answer is that he knew learning English would come back and bite him in his ass. Irony can be found in paragraphs two, six, and the last one. Take the last paragraph as an example: Bryson met the “over-zealous waiter”; and he said he would not tell anyone else that the little snack peanuts cost him $4.80. In fact, he was saying the opposite of what he meant. In the fourth paragraph, “exquisite ugliness” is a typical example of oxymoron, and “a modern concrete box” is an example of metaphor, which refers to the hotel. Parallelism contains a similar form so as to give the essay a definite pattern, and we can find it in the first paragraph when Bryson mentioned that “the train stopped at some darkened station where ... , where ... , where ... .” In the same paragraph, Bryson described that the train “limped across the landscape like a runner with a pulled muscle.” and this is personification. I like this bearded man as well as his travel notes. Faced with the facts, he can always enjoy the flawed beauty in his trip. I have already taken part in the essay, and I had a kind of emotional connection with him. 俏胡子~