Rhetoric, Parallelism, and The Art of Elegant Writing
Do you want to make your sentences memorable? elegant? then parallelism is what you need. Read on to learn what it is and how to use it.
Below is a poem I wrote several years ago which will give you an idea of parallelism:
SilenceSilence, the sound at the beginning:
between the blinks and the cries
of unwanted freedom and responsibility.Silence, the sound in between:
the crashing waves, gaps of the stars
and the chaotic minds of great thinkers.Silence, the sound at the end:
where release may be feared but not fought;
where the silent bliss plays through mute notes
of one eternal string symphony.By Shaun Gurmin.
In a previous post, I talked about the principle of sentences being based on the thought expressed, and we considered how this applies to ideas of equal weighting and ideas of a lesser weighting through subordination.
In this post, we will now take things a step further. When parts of a sentence-thought are of the same rank — are logically coordinate — we express this logical sameness through structural sameness. For example, look at the following sentence:
Having come, I saw, I conquered.
This sentence loses its elegance because each sentence-thought’s rank does not match its structural rank in the sentence. Each idea is of equal significance, but the subordination of the…
