Parallelism

Parallelism is the repeated use of some structure, either vocabulary or grammatical. Here are some examples with the pattern underlined.

Alice likes studying, sleeping, and swimming.
Betsy likes riding her bicycle and playing her guitar.
Carl's father did not approve of what he did nor what he said.

Many idioms use parallelism. Here are a few.

Stupid is as stupid does.
No pain, no gain.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Where there is smoke, there is fire.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Here are some other famous examples.

Bernard M. Baruch: Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
Charles Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.
George W. Bush: We’ve seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers.
Neil Armstrong: That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
John F. Kennedy: My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

Example: The Man I Killed

This is the opening of The Man I Killed. There is a long list, and the pattern "his ... was ..." shows up repeatedly. The author comes back to the pattern many times, before changing style and bluntly ending the sentence.

His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a starshaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him.

The Word "And"

There are many useful conjunctions in the English language: so, but, since, however, etc. One of the most interesting is the word and. When you use the word and to connect two things, you are putting them on the same level as each other. This special kind of parallelism can be used to create surprising contrast.

Mary hung up the phone and moved to Japan.
Bruce wakes up, puts his pants on one leg at a time, and makes gold records.
The house was filled with many things. There was a big-screen TV on the wall, an ancient Chinese vase by the door, and a box of Domino’s pizza on the table.
Mom made dinner that night. Fish and chips, the same as every Friday night. It was cheap and simple and perfect.
Hal likes to play games such as chess, tic-tac-toe, and thermonuclear war.

See the next section for a famous example.

Example: A Farewell to Arms

The following two paragraphs are the opening to Ernest Hemingway's best-selling novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929).

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

In the first paragraph, note how the troops are mixed together with trees, leaves, and dust. Also, although this is written from the narrator's perspective, we don't get much information about how he is feeling. Instead, he is listing what he sees happening around him.

References

Farrington, M. (n.d.) Teaching Texts and Forms [MOOC]. Coursera. Retrieved 2024.
Hemingway, E. (1929). A Farewell to Arms. Scribner.
O'Brien, T. (1990). The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin.
Paquette, J. (2023). Parallelism, Parallel Structure, Parallel Construction. Writing Commons. Retrieved 2024.
Parallelism. (n.d.). Literary Devices. Retrieved 2024.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse