Writing Tools

When David Shribman was a young reporter, he attended a dinner to honor a famous Navy hero, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. Present at the event were three American presidents: Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and Richard M. Nixon, "a spectacle that Sen. Bob Dole would later immortalize as a gathering of 'Hear No Evil, See No Evil ... and Evil.' " This great joke uses two reliable writing strategies, described fully in my book "Writing Tools":

1.) Riff off a familiar phrase to make it new.
2.) Establish a parallel pattern, then give it a twist.

Elements of language that are called "parallel" form some of history's most memorable phrases:

Abraham Lincoln:  "... that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Finley Peter Dunn:  "...comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

Each of these memorable quotations from a collection called "The Sports Pages" derives it power from parallelism:

Muhammad Ali: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

Baseball player Terry Kennedy: "One night we play like King Kong, the next night like Fay Wray."

Chicago Cubs one-time owner Philip K. Wrigley: "Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business, and too much of a business to be called a sport."

Prizefighter Bob Fitzsimmons: "The bigger they come, the harder they fall."

Basketball star Michael Jordan: "The game is my wife. It demands loyalty and responsibility, and it gives me back fulfillment and peace."

An intentional violation of the parallel can produce a pleasing comic or unnerving tragic effect, a reliable strategy for your language toolbox. But an unintended violation of the parallel can dizzy the reader and push her off the path.

To build parallels, remember the word "equal." A word can equal other words; a phrase can equal other phrases; and a clause can equal other clauses. Here's a straightforward example: "The wrestling team has matches scheduled in Hartford, Providence, Boston, and Portland." Those four city names are parallel -- grammatically equal -- with the added benefit of an order that takes us from west to east. But it would be easy enough to knock them out of whack:

"The wrestling team has matches in Hartford, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; Boston; and Portland, Maine." Or how about "dismal Hartford, revitalized Providence, stately Boston, and Portland." In the first case, the writer leaves out the state name Massachusetts; in the second case the writer adds adjectives to the place names, except in the case of Portland, which then sticks out like a cucumber in a pumpkin patch.

This next statement may seem to defy geometric logic, but parallel phrases can become even more parallel. I can write that "His teachers admired Tom as a bright and brawny boy." That's a strong sentence built upon the parallel adjectives "bright" and "brawny," which also happen to alliterate with "boy." Now I'll revise it to "... a brainy and brawny boy." Perhaps you prefer the contrast of bright and brawny, or you think that the brainy/brawny pair is too self-consciously creative. Whatever your preference, recognize that brainy/brawny is more parallel than bright/brawny because of the addition of a single syllable.

Public oratory is the best place to see or hear parallelism in action. I began this essay nine days after presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered an important speech on how race is experienced in America. As with so many other speeches, the author depends heavily upon the drumbeats created by parallel constructions. Here's a sentence from the first page of Obama's remarks:

"What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part -- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

Notice that "on the streets" is parallel to "in the courts" (preposition, article, plural noun); and that "the promise of our ideals" is parallel to "the reality of their time" (article, abstract noun, preposition, possessive adjective, abstract noun).

This analysis should help explain what makes Bob Dole's joke about the three presidents so wicked:  "Hear No Evil, See No Evil ... and Evil." The original phrase, which includes "speak no evil," is burned into our memory, not just from the parallel language, but by the image of three monkeys with hands over their ears, eyes and mouths. When we read those first two parallel clauses, our natural expectation is for a third. The unexpected evil to embody the character of Richard Nixon snaps like a whiplash on a soft night. 

Workshop:

1) Consider this sentence from Barack Obama's speech on race: "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas." Since Kenya is a country, one might expect the speaker to balance that with "the United States of America." Clearly, "Kansas" is the better choice, but why?

2) Here's more from Obama: "Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety -- the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America." In that single paragraph, I see at least seven parallel words or phrases. See if you can identify them. How many did you count?