Elements of Eloquence—Mark Forsyth

Or, the Figures of Rhetoric.

  1. Polyptoton: Use the same word in different parts of speech. Dream a little dream of me. Players gonna play, haters gonna hate. Please please me. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Same word, same sentence, different sense. Memorable, sticky.
  2. Chiasmus: Symmetry. Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Mind on my money, money on my mind.
  3. Isocolon: Equal length weight and balance. We shall go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Makes you sound reasonable. Not the absolute, perfect symmetry of chiasmus, but a pleasing balance.
  4. Tricolon: Triplets. The good, the bad and the ugly. Blood, sweat and tears. Lies, damned lies and statistics. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Lincoln could just have said “democracy”.
  5. Anaphora: Repeated beginnings of phrases. We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the fields, we shall fight them in the streets, we shall fight them in the hills. It was the best of times, it was the worst of time.
  6. Epistrophe: Somewhat the opposite of anaphora. Repeated endings. Every breath you take, every move you make… I’ll be watching you. Almost always the chorus in a song. For Brutus is an honourable man… and Brutus is an honourable man… And, sure, he is an honourable man.
  7. Synesthesia: Mixing up the senses. Personally I hate it. Gulzar does this a lot—horribly. Aapki aankhon mein mehke hue se raaz hain.
  8. Personnification: Morris West wrote about the decency of Death and called Sleep his brother, kept using the pronoun ‘he’.
  9. Schesis Onomaton: Not having a verb in a sentence. “Space. The final frontier.” Works very well on titles, opening and closing lines.
  10. Paradox: Almost every well known Oscar Wilde quote is a paradox. Who shaves the barber? This statement is false. Paradoxes make you think.
  11. Veridical paradox: A paradox that turns out to be true. Not exactly Russell’s paradox, but more like the Monty Hall problem. Something very counter-intuitive.
  12. Hyperbole: This one’s obvious. Yo mama so fat when she sits around the house, she sits around the house. When pigs fly, when hell freezes over. Let the sky fall, when it crumbles…
  13. Iambic pentameter: Seems like the natural rhythm of the English language. Approximately 5 beats and ten syllables. Sentences constructed in this way sound like poetry. A few such consecutive sentences sound like a poem. But then, don’t forget to mix it up.