ABSTRACT
This chapter covers three of the fundamental rhetorical devices that help to produce balance in writing: parallelism, chiasmus, and antithesis. Parallelism is the presentation of several ideas of equal importance by putting them into the same kind of grammatical structure. In other words recurrent syntactical similarities. Chiasmus is a type of parallelism in which the elements which are balanced with each other are presented in reverse order. Antithesis contrasts two ideas by placing them next to each other almost always in a parallel structure. The Style Check section discusses prose rhythm; the Define Your Terms section asks students to define in their own words the rhetorical devices explained in the chapter. The Web research section, It’s in the Cloud, asks students to think about the loss of distinction between some words commonly confused, such as continual and continuous. Students are asked to provide their opinion about whether the distinction is important. The Salt and Pepper section offers advice for creating more effective titles for various writing tasks, including blogs, research papers, emails, and so forth. The chapter ends with a Review Questions quiz and Questions for Thought and Discussion, asking students to think personally about rhetoric and their writing lives ahead.
