| A | B |
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| anaphora | The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs eg. "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France..." -- Churchill |
| parallelism | similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses |
| parallelism example | "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor" -- Declaration of Independence |
| anaphora example | "Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!" -- Shakespeare |
| parallelism example | "So Janey waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.” -- Zora Neale Hurston |
| isocolon | a scheme of parallel structure which occurs when the parallel elements are similar not only in grammatical structure but also in length (number of words or even number of syllables) |
| isocolon example | "His purpose was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to confound the scrupulous.” |
| isocolon example | "An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”—Zora Neale Hurston |
| antithesis | the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, often in parallel structure |
| antithesis example | "What if I am rich, and another is poor—strong, and he is weak—intelligent, and he is benighted—elevated, and he is depraved?" -- William Lloyd Garrison |
| anastrophe | inversion of the natural or usual word order |
| anastrophe example | "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” --John F. Kennedy |
| inversion | reversing the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase |
| inversion example | "to the hounds she rode, with her flags behind her streaming" |
| loose sentence | a sentence that is grammatically complete before its end |
| loose sentence example | "Thalia played the violin with an intensity never before seen in a high school music class"; sentence is grammatically complete with word violin |
| periodic sentence | sentence that is not grammatically complete until its last phrase |
| periodic sentence example | "Despite Glenn's hatred of his sister's laziness and noisy eating habits, he still cared for her." |
| parenthesis | insertion of some verbal unit in a position that interrupts the normal syntactical flow of the sentence; one might use commas, or dashes, for example |
| parenthesis example | "And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London" -- Virginia Woolf |
| apposition (appositive) | placing side by side two coordinate elements, the second of which serves as an explanation or modification of the first |
| apposition (appositive) example | "The mountain was the earth, her home.”—Rudolfo Anaya |
| apposition (appositive) example | "Here was the source of the mistaken strategy –the reason why activists could so easily ignore class and could consider race alone a sufficient measure of social oppression." —Richard Rodriguez |
| ellipses | deliberate omission of a word or of words which are readily implied by the context |
| ellipses example | "And he to England shall along with you.” --Shakespeare |
| asyndeton | deliberate omission of conjunctions between a series of related clauses |
| asyndeton example | "I came, I saw, I conquered.”—Julius Caesar |
| asyndeton example | "They may have it in well doing, they have it in learning, they may have it even in criticism.” -- Matthew Arnold |
| polysyndeton | deliberate use of many conjunctions |
| polysyndeton example | "and it was dark and there was water standing in the street and no lights and windows broke and boats all up in the town and trees blown down and everything all blown" -- Ernest Hemingway |
| anaphora | repetition of the same word or groups of words at the beginnings of successive clauses |
| anaphora example | "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.”—Winston Churchill |
| epistrophe | repetition of the same word or group of words at the ends of successive clauses |
| epistrophe example | "When we first came we were very many and you were very few. Now you are many and we are getting very few.”—Red Cloud |
| climax | arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in an order of increasing importance |
| climax example | "More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope" (Romans) |
| chiasmus | reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses |
| chiasmus example | "Exalts his enemies, his friends destroys." —John Dryden |
| antanaclasis (a type of pun) | repetition of a word in two different senses |
| antanaclasis example | "Your argument is sound, nothing but sound.” –Benjamin Franklin |
