1. What is it?

Parallelism is a technique of ‘balancing’ sentences – meaning all sections are similar in pattern or structure – by repeating a structure or words.

It is most commonly used in speeches, poetry, and advertising.

2. Why use it?

3. Examples

Run fast, jump high, try hard, and never ever give up.

She has a large, red house by the lake; a quick, sexy car in the driveway; and a handsome, elegant man on her arm.

At 18 those dull school yard ideals had been replaced by gloriously sinful university ideas. He fell for a girl with dark hair, then fell for another with red hair. It was a wonderful time, or at least it was until he fell for a girl with blonde hair who broke him and his spirit and his life.

4. Examples in literature

A Tale of Two Cities 
by Charles Dickens

Excerpt from Book the First ‘Recalled to Life’, Chapter 1 ‘The Period’:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

Jamila 
by Chingiz Aytmatov

Excerpt (translated from Russian):

I was astounded at the passion and fire of the melody itself. I could not describe it then, nor can I now. Was it just his voice or something more tangible emerging from his very soul that could arouse such emotion in another person, and bring one’s innermost thoughts to life?
If only I could recreate his song. It contained few words, yet even without words it revealed a great human soul. I have never heard such singing before or since. This tune was neither Kirgiz nor Kazakh, yet in it was something of both. His music combined the very best melodies of the two unrelated peoples and had woven them into a single, unrepeatable song. It was a song of the mountains and the steppe, first soaring up into the sky like the Kirgiz mountains, then rolling free like the Kazakh steppe.
I listened in amazement. So that’s what he’s like, I thought. Who would have thought it?
As we crossed the steppe along the soft, beaten track, Daniyar’s singing took wing, songs followed one another with astonishing facility. Was he really so gifted? What had happened to him? It was as if he had been saving himself for this very day. His hour had come at last.
And all of a sudden I began to understand the strangeness that made people shrug and mock; his dreaminess; his love of solitude; his silent manner. Now I understood why he sat on the look-out hill of an evening and why he spent a night by himself on the riverbank, why he constantly hearkened to sounds others could not hear and why his eyes would suddenly gleam and his drawn eyebrows twitch. He was a man deeply in love. I felt it was not simply a love for another person, it was somehow an uncommon, expansive love for life and earth. He had kept this love within himself, in his music, in his being. A person with no feeling, no matter how good his voice, could never have sung like that.

5. Tasks

Task 1: Write a sentence using a complex form of parallelism.
Task 2: Write a paragraph in which parallelism is a prominent technique.