ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the sorts of rhetorical devices that help make a political speech memorable and exciting to an audience. These include: Binomials; Bicolons; Tricolons (or 'three-part list'); Contrasting pairs and Oxymorons. Binomials are semi-fixed phrases which are very common in the language in general, in both literal and figurative forms. Bicolons are expressions containing two parallel phrases and thus tend to be rather more extended than binomials. Like the bicolon, the tricolon employs parallelism. The simplest kind of three-part list or tricolon is the repetition of three words or phrases. The contrasting pair (or antithesis) is a structure containing two parts which are parallel in structure but at the same time somehow opposed in meaning. The term 'oxymoron' is often used to make an argument by negatively evaluating some entity, by suggesting that the two components are incompatible.
