Entertainment / Literature / Parallelism: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, 'King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable.' The previous sentence has parallel structure in use of adjectives. However, the following sentence does not use parallelism: King Alfred tried to make clear laws that had precision and were equitable. If the writer uses two parallel structures, the result is isocolon parallelism: The bigger they are, the harder they fall. If there are three structures, it is tricolon parallelism: That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. Or, as one student wrote, 'Her purpose was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to startle the complacent.' Shakespeare used this device to good effect in Richard II when King Richard laments his unfortunate position: i'll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman's gown, My figured goblets for a dish of wood . . . . (3.3.170-73)
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Entertainment / Literature / Distych: The technical term for a two-line group in which a pair of metrical lines of different lengths together compose or express a complete idea (Wheeler 38). In Greek elegies, these distichs are usually rh MORE