One thing that I realized while reading this week's chapter in Noden was how often parallelism is used in speeches when I decided to look up some mentor texts. I think that it is becuase the language seems poetic when it circles back on itself. And it is easier to remember if it repeats certain phrases. I can attest to that from personal experience. At my high school students were required to memorize and declaim a five minute speech or monologue of our choice. I struggled with memorization until I realized that if I broke my speech into chunks before and after a phrase or an idea paralleled itself, I was able to remember it better. Furthermore, I found that parallellism tends to reflect the natural rise and fall of language when reading or speaking it aloud.
After sucessfully declaiming my speech in front of my class, and later in front of my whole high school (!), I could see why Homer had the same phrases at the start of a new passage in The Odyssey. "Sing to me, O Muse..." and "Then Grey-eyed Athene..." both come to mind. Before I realized the importance of paralleism, those repetitions bothered me so much when reading The Odyssey. It was so he recite thousands of lines of poetry - instantly - in a pre-google era! Speaking of poetry, I think that it is another area that requires rhythum beyond just meter. So many times, anaphora and epistrophe in poetry are overlooked in favor of counting the number of syllables in a line.
Another thing that I noticed was that it is difficult to give examples of parallelism. As such, I think that this is probaly one instance where showing students what it is probably will take a little more precidence than having them attempt to create it, at least early on in their writing careers. Thus, I liked how the strategies in this chapter centered around finding good examples of finding rhythum in pieces of writing. Strategy 2, where students hear a dramatic reading of "Light's Out," followed by identifying the repetitions that they hear. I liked that Poe was suggested for high schoolers this activity. I could see "The Raven" or "The Tell-Tale Heart" being used in a similar manner with great effectiveness. As I said earlier, parallelism often reflects the rise and fall of language, so it makes sense to use an activity that deals with declamitory language.
I liked how the chapter drew attention to how lifeless a passage can sound without parallel structure. I think my favorite example was on page 61, where the Star Trek opening was rewritten minus the parallelism. Something to remember while editing writing is not to cut out parallelism for the sake of brevity.
A final note on paralellism: I looked back over my sentence stalking / mentor text list and realized that many, if not most, of my sentences used paralellism. Coincidental? I think not. Furthermore, my book that I'm reading for this class, Bill Bryson's Made In America, made me realize that what makes Bryson so sucessful at conveying near-encyclopedic amounts of information in an interesting way is how he circles back to the same ideas. Definitely something to think about when presenting this book to the class.
