1、parallelism Similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words,phrases,or clauses.Eg.Immature poets imitate;mature poets steal.(T.S.Eliot,Philip Massinger,1920)When you are right you cannot be too radical;when you are wrong,you cannot be too conservative.(Martin Luther King,Jr.,Why We Cant
2、 Wait.Signet,1964)Buy a bucket of chicken and have a barrel of fun.(slogan of Kentucky Fried Chicken)We do not ride on the railroad;it rides upon us.(Henry David Thoreau,Walden,1854)The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig.(E.B.White,Death of a Pig.The Atlantic,January 1948)It to
3、ok a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner,but the jailer as well;to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you;to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past,but a means of confronting it with inclusion and generosity and truth.He changed laws,but he a
4、lso changed hearts.(President Barack Obama,speech at the memorial service for former South African president Nelson Mandela,December 10,2013)After a few miles,we drove off a cliff.It wasnt a big cliff.It was only about four feet high.But it was enough to blow out the front tire,knock off the back bu
5、mper,break Dads glasses,make Aunt Edythe spit out her false teeth,spill a jug of Kool-Aid,bump Missys head,spread the Auto Bingo pieces all over,and make Mark do number two.(John Hughes,Vacation 58.National Lampoon,1980)New roads;new ruts.(attributed to G.K.Chesterton.New Society,1986)Hes quite a ma
6、n with the girls.They say hes closed the eyes of many a man and opened the eyes of many a woman.(Telegraph operator to Penny Worth in Angel and the Badman,1947)They are laughing at me,not with me.(Bart Simpson,The Simpsons)Voltaire could both lick boots and put the boot in.He was at once opportunist
7、 and courageous,cunning and sincere.He managed,with disconcerting ease,to reconcile love of freedom with love of hours.(attributed to Dominique Edd,source unknown)Truth is not a diet but a condiment.(attributed to Christopher Morley,source unknown)Some of the people said that the elephant had gone i
8、n one direction,some said that he had gone in another,some professed not even to have heard of any elephant.(George Orwell,Shooting An Elephant.New Writing,1936)Our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road,mental illness with a pill,poverty with a law,slums with a bulld
9、ozer,urban conflict with a gas,racism with a goodwill gesture.(Philip Slater,The Pursuit of Loneliness.Houghton Mifflin,1971)Unlike novelists and playwrights,who lurk behind the scenes while distracting our attention with the puppet show of imaginary characters,unlike scholars and journalists,who qu
10、ote the opinions of others and shelter behind the hedges of neutrality,the essayist has nowhere to hide.(Scott Russell Sanders,The Singular First Person.The Sewanee Review,Fall 1998)O well for the fishermans boy,That he shouts with his sister at play!O well for the sailor lad,That he sings in his bo
11、at on the bay!(Alfred Lord Tennyson,Break,Break,Break,1842)Todays students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains.If they can conceive it and believe it,they can achieve it.They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.(Rev.Jesse Jackson,q
12、uoted by Ashton Applewhite et al.in And I Quote,rev.ed.Thomas Dunne,2003)Humanity has advanced,when it has advanced,not because it has been sober,responsible,and cautious,but because it has been playful,rebellious,and immature.(Tom Robbins,Still Life with Woodpecker,1980)When success happens to an E
13、nglish writer,he acquires a new typewriter.When success happens to an American writer,he acquires a new life.(Martin Amis,Kurt Vonnegut:After the Slaughterhouse.The Moronic Inferno.Jonathan Cape,1986)A good ad should be like a good sermon;it must not only comfort the afflicted-it also must afflict t
14、he comfortable.(Bernice Fitz-Gibbon,Macys,Gimbels,and Me:How to Earn$90,000 a Year in Retail Advertising.Simon and Schuster,1967)It is by logic we prove,but by intuition we discover.(Leonardo da Vinci)If you are idle,be not solitary;if you are solitary,be not idle.(Samuel Johnson,quoted by James Bos
15、well in The Life of Samuel Johnson,1791)Read not to contradict and confute;nor to believe and take for granted;nor to find talk and discourse;but to weigh and consider.(Francis Bacon,Of Studies,1625)Those who write clearly have readers;those who write obscurely have commentators.(Albert Camus)I had
16、been short,and now I was tall.I had been skinny and quiet and religious,and now I was good-looking and muscular.It was Sally Baldwin who brought me along,told me what to wear and do and think and say.She was never wrong;she never lost her patience.She created me,and when she was done we broke up in
17、a formal sense,but she kept calling me.(Jane Smiley,Good Faith.Alfred A.Knopf,2003)The wheels wheeled,the chairs spun,the cotton candy tinted the faces of children,the bright leaves tinted the woods and hills.A cluster of amplifiers spread the theme of love over everything and everybody;the mild bre
18、eze spread the dust over everything and everybody.Next morning,in the Lafayette Hotel in Portland,I went down to breakfast and found May Craig looking solemn at one of the tables and Mr.Murray,the auctioneer,looking cheerful at another.(E.B.White,Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street.Essays of E.B.White.Ha
19、rper,1977)Effects Created by Parallelism The value of parallel structure goes beyond aesthetics.It points up the structure of the sentence,showing readers what goes with what and keeping them on the right track.(Claire K.Cook,Line by Line.Houghton Mifflin,1985)Parallelism has the potential to create
20、 rhythm,emphasis and drama as it clearly presents ideas or action.Consider this long,graceful(and witty)sentence that begins a magazine article on sneakers:A long time ago-before sneaker companies had the marketing clout to spend millions of dollars sponsoring telecasts of the Super Bowl;before stre
21、et gangs identified themselves by the color of their Adidas;before North Carolina States basketball players found they could raise a little extra cash by selling the freebie Nikes off their feet;and before a sneakers very sole had been gelatinized,Energaired,Hexalited,torsioned and injected with pre
22、ssurized gas-sneakers were,well,sneakers.First note the obvious parallelism of four clauses beginning with the word before and proceeding with similar grammatical patterns.Then note the parallel list of sneaker attributes:gelatinized,Energaired and so on.This is writing with pizzazz.It moves.It almo
23、st makes you interested in sneakers!Of course you noticed the nice bit of word play-the sneakers very sole.paired construction In a sentence,a balanced arrangement of two roughly equal parts:a form of parallelism.By convention,items in a paired construction appear in parallel grammatical form:a noun
24、 phrase is paired with another noun phrase,an-ing form with another-ing form,and so on.Eg.I believe that man will not merely endure:he will prevail.(William Faulkner,Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,Dec.10,1950)Certainty of death,small chance of success:what are we waiting for?(John Rhys-Davies as Giml
25、i in The Lord of the Rings:The Return of the King,2003)So let us begin anew-remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness,and sincerity is always subject to proof.Let us never negotiate out of fear,but let us never fear to negotiate.(President John Kennedy,Inaugural Address,Jan.2
26、0,1961)To the people of poor nations,we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow;to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.(President Barack Obama,Inaugural Address,Jan.20,2009)One might ponder the melancholy question whether it does take misfortune an
27、d great tension,national agitation and even calamity,to arouse and inspire film-makers to dare radical leaps ahead and explode devastating expressions.(Bosley Crowther,The Great Films:Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures.Putnam,1971)Something momentous was bound to happen soon.The entire collective
28、 unconscious could not be wrong about that.But what would it be?And would it be apocalyptic or rejuvenating?A cure for cancer or a nuclear bang?A change in the weather or a change in the sea?(Tom Robbins,Still Life With Woodpecker.Random House,1980)Remember how strong we are in our happiness,and how
29、 weak he is in his misery.(Charles Dickens,A Tale of Two Cities,1859)Pairings for Emphasis When parallel ideas are paired,the emphasis falls on words that underscore comparisons or contrasts,especially when they occur at the end of a phrase or clause:Eg.We must stop talking about the American dream
30、and start listening to the dreams of Americans.-Reubin Askew(Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers,A Writers Reference,7th ed.Bedford/St.Martins,2011)The obvious strength of a paired construction is in its balance and seeming thoughtfulness.When you use a paired construction you are demonstrating that you
31、are capable of planning ahead in a mature fashion,and are not merely putting down words as they pop into your mind.(Murray Bromberg and Julius Liebb,The English You Need to Know,2nd ed.Barrons,1997)balanced sentence A sentence made up of two parts that are roughly equal in length,importance,and gram
32、matical structure:a paired construction.A balanced sentence that makes a contrast is called antithesis.Sleeping on a Seely is like sleeping on a cloud.(advertising slogan for Seely mattresses)Buy a bucket of chicken and have a barrel of fun.(advertising slogan for KFC)If youve got the time,weve got
33、the beer.(advertising slogan for Miller beer)Light is faster,but we are safer.(advertising slogan for Global Jet Airlines)Vision without action is daydream;action without vision is nightmare.(Japanese proverb)Life is a comedy to those who think,a tragedy to those who feel.(Horace Walpole)On days whe
34、n warmth is the most important need of the human heart,the kitchen is the place you can find it;it dries the wet socks,it cools the hot little brain.(E.B.White,Coon Tree.Essays of E.B.White.Harper,1977)Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth,and every other man has a right to knock him d
35、own for it.(Samuel Johnson,quoted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson,1791)And the more I thought over what I had got to say,the less I found I could say it,without some reference to this intangible or intractable question.It made all the difference,in asserting any principle of war,wheth
36、er one assumed that a discharge of artillery would merely knead down a certain quantity of once living clay into a level line,as in a brickfield;or whether,out of every separately Christian-named portion of the ruinous heap,there went out,into the smoke and dead-fallen air of battle,some astonished
37、condition of soul,unwillingly released.It made all the difference,in speaking of the possible range of commerce,whether one assumed that all bargains related only to visible property-or whether property,for the present invisible,but nevertheless real,was elsewhere purchaseable on other terms.It made
38、 all the difference,in addressing a body of men subject to considerable hardship,and having to find some way out of it-whether one could confidently say to them,My friends-you have only to die,and all will be right;or whether one had any secret misgiving that such advice was more blessed to him that
39、 gave than to him that took it.(John Ruskin,The Crown of Wild Olive,1866)How Balanced Sentences Reinforce MeaningBeyond highlighting specific words and ideas,balance has a deeper significance.It expresses a way of looking at the world.Implicit in the balanced style is a sense of objectivity,control,
40、and proportion.In the following passage about Lord Chesterfield,the critic F.L.Lucas reinforces his argument by the reasonableness of his balanced sentences.The very style seems to confirm the fairness and lack of dogmatism suggested by such phrases as seem to me and I think:In fine,there are things
41、 about Chesterfield that seem to me rather repellant;things that it is an offense in critics to defend.He is typical of one side of the 18th century-of what still seems to many its most typical side.But it does not seem to me the really good side of that century;and Chesterfield remains,I think,less
42、 an example of things to pursue in life than of things to avoid.Balance and parallelism do not communicate meaning by themselves.The primary units of meaning,of course,are words.But balanced and parallel constructions do reinforce and enrich meaning.(Thomas S.Kane,The New Oxford Guide to Writing.Oxf
43、ord University Press,1988)antithesis(grammar and rhetoric)A rhetorical term for the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases or clauses.Love is an ideal thing,marriage a real thing.(Goethe)Everybody doesnt like something,but nobody doesnt like Sara Lee.(advertising slogan)There are so
44、many things that we wish we had done yesterday,so few that we feel like doing today.(Mignon McLaughlin,The Complete Neurotics Notebook.Castle Books,1981)We notice things that dont work.We dont notice things that do.We notice computers,we dont notice pennies.We notice e-book readers,we dont notice bo
45、oks.(Douglas Adams,The Salmon of Doubt:Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time.Macmillan,2002)Hillary has soldiered on,damned if she does,damned if she doesnt,like most powerful women,expected to be tough as nails and warm as toast at the same time.(Anna Quindlen,Say Goodbye to the Virago.Newsweek,June
46、 16,2003)It was the best of times,it was the worst of times,it was the age of wisdom,it was the age of foolishness,it was the epoch of belief,it was the epoch of incredulity,it was the season of Light,it was the season of Darkness,it was the spring of hope,it was the winter of despair,we had everyth
47、ing before us,we had nothing before us,we were all going direct to Heaven,we were all going direct the other way.(Charles Dickens,A Tale of Two Cities,1859)Tonight you voted for action,not politics as usual.You elected us to focus on your jobs,not ours.(President Barack Obama,election night victory
48、speech,November 7,2012)Youre easy on the eyesHard on the heart.(Terri Clark)We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.(Martin Luther King,Jr.,speech at St.Louis,1964)The world will little note,nor long remember what we say here,but it can never forget what they did here.
49、(Abraham Lincoln,The Gettysburg Address,1863)All the joy the world containsHas come through wishing happiness for others.All the misery the world containsHas come through wanting pleasure for oneself.(Shantideva)The more acute the experience,the less articulate its expression.(Harold Pinter,Writing
50、for the Theatre,1962)And let my liver rather heat with wineThan my heart cool with mortifying groans.(Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare)I would rather be ashes than dust!I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot.I wo
