Parallel Structure Is Poetic, Persuasive, and Powerful
Two of the more famous speeches of the previous century were delivered in the same city — Washington, D.C. — within three years of each other: President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on August 28, 1963. Obviously, these two speeches received a lot of notoriety because of the power and positions of the speakers. However, both speeches are still remembered today in part because both Kennedy and King used parallel structure in their presentations.
Parallel structure, or parallelism, is the repetition of certain words and/or phrases and/or patterns to make the message — either spoken or written — more powerful and more memorable. One of the simplest examples, and yet one of the most memorable, is the phrase Julius Caesar uttered when he referred to his conquest of Zela (part of modern Turkey) in 47 B.C.: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” Caesar used the pronoun “I” three times for emphasis. Yes, he could have said, “I came, saw, and conquered,” but that one sentence doesn’t have the same dramatic effect as the three shorter, parallel sentences. Kennedy and King also used repetition in their speeches.
When Kennedy spoke as President for the first time, he wanted to stress both the potential and the danger that were present in the nuclear age…
