Figures II: Schemes

Why do people remember some sentences for two thousand years and forget others the next day?

Often it is not what the sentence says. It is its shape.

Three words that march together. Two halves that mirror each other. The same word at the start of every line. These are the schemes: patterns of words.

In Book 3 of the Rhetoric, Aristotle praises the periodic sentence: a sentence with a clear shape, whose end can be seen from its beginning, so that the listener can follow it and enjoy it, like a runner who can see the finishing line.

He especially likes antithesis, where opposites are set side by side: “They made the war; we pay for it.” Antithesis pleases, he says, because opposites are easy to understand, and even more so when they stand next to each other; and because it looks like an argument, setting one thing against another.

But he adds a warning, as always. Patterns that are too obvious seem artificial, and the audience stops trusting the speaker. Later teachers named dozens of schemes: anaphora (the same words at the start of each phrase), chiasmus (a mirror pattern: A B, B A), asyndeton (no and), the rule of three, and the rhetorical question. The most famous example of all is just three words long.