"Trope" comes from a Greek word meaning "turn." In the rhetorical sense, a trope refers to a "turn" in the way that words are being used to communicate something more than--or different from--a literal or straightforward message. Tropes are part of "deep structure" meanings and include such rhetorical devices as allegories, allusions, euphemisms, irony, metaphors, metonymy, symbolism, and synecdoche. In contrast, "scheme" comes from a word meaning "sign." Schemes are part of the "surface structure" and include such phonological devices as alliteration, assonance, cacophony, homophones, parallelism, puns, rhyme, rhythm, and tautology. In this article, the authors use the names in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books to teach about the rhetorical concepts of tropes and schemes.