Parellelism and Chiasmus

 

Parallelism and Chiasmus are significant rhetorical and literary devices in terms of introducing ideas to the reader or listener. Parallelism is mainly used in sight of define specific ideas, that are not underestimate in their importance and to clarify a non-hierarchy within the order of ideas. This is usually the usage of Parallelism within academic texts as due the clarification of the equalization of each listed idea. In terms of the usage of Parallelism in literary texts, it is important to be responsive concerning the rhythm it’s evokes by repetition, which has an impact on the estimation of each idea.

Chiasmus on the other hand rather focuses on the artistic effect by reversing the key elements to emphasize on the importance of the ideas. Preferably used by politicians to evoke eagerness and to emphasize the problem or aim in their speeches. 

                                “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us fear to negotiate.”

                                   (John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address (January 20, 1961))

Quotation and Citation

In our last session of Text Production we talked at length about quotation and citation. Even though these two words are often used interchangeably they actually mean two different things. Quoting is basically repeating something someone has said or written, using the exact same wording as the original source and citing means giving reference to a specific source as the resource from which you gathered information. There are different styles of citation, e.g. the Chicago Citation Style or the MLA Citation Style, which is the one we use in our studies.

Citation is important because you are acknowledging the sources that have influenced your thinking while also pointing your readers in the direction of that source, should they wish to find out more. Science of any kind is all in all a joint endeavour, even though individuals write individual paper, they all contribute to further human knowledge. By citing your sources correctly you recognize all the other writers whose work to build upon to advance a particular field of study. 

Parallelism

Parallelism and how it works (simplistically speaking)

Parallelism is a stylistic device which helps an author structuring a text, and putting emphasis on specific parts of it. At the same time the reader benefits from information conveyed in parallelisms too. Instructions, dates, and any kind of list will most likely be read and remembered very easily when presented in a “parallel” way. One of the keys to successfully storing information in the long-term memory part of the brain is repetition.

If the author of a political essay wants to guide their readers through the text in a certain way, and if the author wants to convince their readers of a certain opinion, parallelism is an effective way to do so.

I just used parallelism to emphasize the strong relationship authors have with their readers through their work, and also to emphasize the power that lies within that relationship. By using the same subject and object in each part of the sentence, this mental bond grows even stronger.

When explaining this phenomenon in the previous sentence, I again used parallelism to point out how the use of this stylistic device really helps emphasizing certain information. You, the reader, will now probably think of “emphasis” when hearing the word “parallelism” or when noticing it in a text, and with that all the knowledge you just gained will come along with it.

You might be highly annoyed, or slightly grateful, or solidly entertained, but you can not stop yourself from noticing now that even this last sentence started with on of those parallelisms.

Parallelism in Grammar and Rhetoric

In his blog entry “What are the Functions of Parallelism and Chiasmus?”, which you can find further down on this page, Aaron Gowen criticizes the vague definitions of the terms “parallelism” and “chiasmus” found in some textbooks. He states that in those texts, the few examples illustrating the two concepts are taken from older literary works, whereas the common use of parallelisms and chiasmi in every-day language is completely ignored. In this blog entry, I would like to respond to Aaron’s critique by taking a closer look at the concept of “parallelism”. In my opinion, most of the misunderstandings concerning this term are created because we fail to distinguish between two different usages of parallelism, namely the grammatical and the rhetorical usage.

First of all, there is the grammatical meaning of the concept that Aaron talks about in his comment. In grammar, parallelism is the usage of grammatically similar clauses or phrases in a sentence, resulting in a parallel sentence structure. The sentence “Susan likes eating, drinking, and cooking.”, in which the verb “likes”  triggers all three gerunds “eating”, “drinking” and “cooking”, is an example for this kind of parallelism. In a faulty parallelism, by contrast, one of the words belongs to a different grammatical category, for instance: “Susan likes eating, drinking and to eat.” While this sentence is still grammatically correct, it sounds odd because “to eat” is an infinitive instead of a gerund, unlike “eating” and “drinking”.

However, there is also a second kind of parallelism, namely the one used as a rhetoric device in literary texts, which is characterized by its repetitive structure. According to literarydevices.com, “[p]arallelism is the usage of repeating words and forms to give pattern and rhythm to a passage in literature. Parallelism often either juxtaposes contrasting images or ideas so as to show their stark difference, or joins similar concepts to show their connection.” (http://www.literarydevices.com/parallelism/) Consequently, parallelism in its rhetorical usage is not restricted to grammatical concordance of several words. It rather aims at enhancing the similarity of certain images by employing parallel form. For instance, Tim O’Brien makes use of parallelism in order to compare war and peace: “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.” (Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried, in: http://www.literarydevices.com/parallelism/) Similarly, chiasmi like “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (John F. Kennedy) are used to highlight contrast.

Hence, the two different types of parallelism may differ in both form and function. In order to avoid confusion, it is therefore still worthwhile to differentiate between parallelism in rhetoric and grammar, although many parallelisms, such as the famous “Veni, vidi, vici”, belong to both categories at the same time.