A Brief Introduction of Some Figures of Speech.docVIP

Parallelism By repeating certain grammatical structures, a writer can balance his material so as to order it, to emphasize it, and to make it easier for his audience to grasp. The principle of parallelism consists of expressing similar thoughts in duplicate structures, and it can be applied to structures of all ranks: Verbs: I approved, admired, and adored her way of winning a point in the argument. Nouns: power, glory, profit--- these were the aims of the attacking Huns. Phrases: I want to cry out, to complain in courts of law, and to lead an indignant army. Notice that merely using three phrases is not enough for parallel structure. The phrase must duplicate each other in their main grammatical features. Clauses: give me the man who will speak before he acts, who will think before he speaks, and who will listen before he thinks. None of them is available: John has gone to the movie, Hiram has gone to the laundry, and Bert has gone home. Sentences: I protest against the manufacturing standards which could permit such a shoddy product to reach the market. I protest against the advertising ethics which could conceal such defects in the goods advertised. I protest most of all against the public apathy which will tolerate such an abuse of its trust year after year. The specific uses of parallel structure are: to develop a climatic order of ideas; to group or link similar idea; to list the items of a series; to organize the details which support a generalization. I had rarely witnessed such frenzied activities: office boys darting along the aisles, clerks scuttling to the file cabinets, executives clawing through the heaps of paper before, telephones jangling on every desk. Antithesis It is a special kind of parallelism and perhaps the most forceful kind of two-part parallelism. As a figure of speech it is characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences or ideas . antithesis is balancing of one term against the other for emphasis and the repeating of