- Parallelism is a rhetorical device that compounds words or phrases that have equivalent meanings so as to create a definite pattern. This structure is particularly effective when “specifying or enumerating pairs or series of like things”. A scheme of balance, parallelism represents “one of the basic principles of grammar and rhetoric”.
And you! Friendless, brainless, helpless, hopeless! Do you want me to send you back to where you were? Unemployed, in Greenland?!
Vizzini, The Princess Bride