This episode is an interview with Mark Forsyth, author of The Elements of Eloquence, exploring the rhetorical formulas that make language memorable — from pop lyrics and political speeches to Shakespeare and the Bible — and how writers can practice and deploy them deliberately.
The core rhetorical devices and why they stick
Progressio (a series of antitheses) structures a line by swinging between opposites — hot/cold, yes/no, in/out — creating a rhythm that lodges in memory; examples include Katy Perry’s “Hot n Cold,” the opening of A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”), Ecclesiastes (“a time to weep, a time to rejoice”), and the Book of Common Prayer marriage vows (“for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”).
Diacope (a verbal sandwich) repeats a word or phrase with a brief interruption — “Bond, James Bond,” “to be or not to be,” “free at last, free at last,” “a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” “alone, alone, all, all alone” — making lines instantly quotable and structurally satisfying.
Chiasmus (reversal) mirrors a phrase in reverse order — “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” “mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind,” “with money on my mind and my mind on my money” — exploiting the brain’s love of symmetry to create a feeling of inevitable truth.
Epistrophe (repetition at the end) drives force through a repeated closing — Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches… we shall fight in the fields… we shall fight in the streets,” Obama’s “yes we can” — signaling grandeur and resolve without feeling manipulative in high-stakes moments.
Periodic sentence (delayed main verb) piles conditional clauses before the payoff — Kipling’s “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs… yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it” — building tension that the final clause releases.
Anadiplosis (last word becomes first of next clause) chains ideas tightly — Yoda’s “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering,” Paul McCartney’s “here, here making each day of the year… there, there running my hands across the sand” — a technique McCartney deliberately inserted into his manuscript.
Polyptoton (same root, different form) shifts a word across grammatical categories — “to be a light to lighten the Gentiles” (noun → verb), “give us this day our daily bread” (noun → adjective), “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” (verb → noun) — creating density and music from a single root.
Tricolon (groups of three) arranges any three parallel elements — “anytime, any place, anywhere,” “I came, I saw, I conquered,” “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” “lies, damned lies, and statistics” — the smallest unit that feels like a completed arc.
Adynaton (listing impossibilities) expresses boundless love by naming things that will never happen — Auden’s “I’ll love you till China and Africa meet, and the river jumps over the mountain, and the salmon sing in the street” — a hyperbolic catalog that feels more sincere than literal promises.
Why these devices work on readers and listeners
They act as attention signals: a sudden pattern (repetition, reversal, antithesis) tells the reader “pay attention here,” letting the writer modulate pace — calm down, now listen — without exhausting the reader with constant intensity.
They expand what concise language flattens: saying “everybody” is efficient but invisible; saying “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” forces the reader to inhabit the totality.
They fit the brain’s memory receptors: humans love symmetry, rhythm, and threes; rhetorical shapes match cognitive preferences, so lines like “fly my pretties, fly” (never actually in The Wizard of Oz) overwrite the real line because the diacope form is stickier than the truth.
They recreate the missing cues of speech: writing lacks tone, gesture, and facial expression; rhetorical patterns supply prosody and emphasis on the page, telling the reader how to “hear” the voice.
The rise, fall, and rediscovery of rhetoric
The ancient Greeks and Romans systematized these figures 2,500 years ago; they were central to education, politics, and poetry for centuries.
The Romantics recast writing as spontaneous passion, treating calculation as inauthentic — yet the Romantics themselves used the figures heavily; the stigma pushed rhetoric into Latin/Greek classrooms and out of vernacular writing instruction.
Modern business and technical writing prizes concision and clarity (rightly for dishwasher manuals), but the same minimalism hollows out speeches, poems, and stories that need to be remembered.
Forsyth wrote The Elements of Eloquence because no modern English book cataloged the figures with great examples — he wanted the book he’d needed at sixteen.
Practicing the scales: how a writer internalizes the forms
Treat writing like jazz: musicians drill scales and harmony for years so improvisation flows from a “well-trodden head”; writers should drill forms (iambic pentameter, rhyme, each figure) until they become automatic, then write fast.
Iambic pentameter as the fundamental scale: “da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM” — improvise nonsense lines while walking (“the chair is on the carpet in the room”) until the meter runs in the background of your prose.
Prepare thoroughly, then sprint: walk, think, talk to an imaginary listener until the argument is clear; sit down and write the section in one flow; if it reads wrong, delete and rerun the approach rather than tinkering.
Editing as a rerun, not a tweak: expanding or contracting a sentence mid-stream kills rhythm; better to take the run-up again.
Voice is established in the first paragraph: “a man walked” is voiceless; “a chap sauntered” signals English posh; “a dude strolled” signals American casual — the opening is an establishing shot that teaches the reader how to hear the rest.
Rhetoric in the wild: pop, advertising, slang, and history
Pop lyrics use the figures instinctively — progressio in the Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye,” epanalepsis in “Yesterday,” anadiplosis in “Here, There and Everywhere,” chiasmus in Coolio’s “money on my mind / mind on my money,” polyptoton in Taylor Swift’s “haters gonna hate, hate, hate / players gonna play, play, play.”
Advertising runs on tricolon (“anytime, any place, anywhere” — where “any place” and “anywhere” are functionally identical) because three is the minimal completed set.
Slang dictionaries are time capsules: 18th-century highwaymen had dozens of terms for being hanged (“dancing on nothing,” “artichoke for breakfast”); “gongle” (to stare idly at a canal) survives in the houseboat community — language invents words for the pressures of a life world.
Texting and smartphones shifted writing from rare to constant; early SMS forced a “lapidary” brevity (like carving stone), then smartphones restored length and orality — texts now carry conversational rhythm, accelerating semantic drift (troll, spam, browser, web all flipped meaning in decades).
Shakespeare the thief who improved the loot
Shakespeare lifted passages from Plutarch and others, then added alliteration and iambic pentameter — “the barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water” becomes musical where the source was flat.
“Full fathom five thy father lies” works because of the f-alliteration; “your father is 9.8 meters underwater” means the same but has no hold on memory.
He stole the content and reforged the form — “a thief who steals your socks and then darns them, breaks into your house and tidies it up.”
Memorable lines often break logic and grammar
Milton’s Lycidas: “there entertain him all the saints above… and wipe tears forever from his eyes” — syntax frays but the vision of heaven lands.
Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night” — “forests of the night” is grammatically ambiguous (forests at night? night as a place containing forests?) yet unforgettable.
Churchill said “blood, sweat, toil, and tears”; history remembers “blood, sweat, and tears” — the tricolon corrects the quadrilateral.
The brain edits reality to fit the rhetorical slot.
Practical takeaways for any writer
You don’t need the Greek names (chiasmus, epistrophe, anadiplosis) — Forsyth includes them only as chapter labels; the formulas themselves are the tools.
Keep a personal cheat sheet with your own labels and a few examples per device; when a passage needs force, scan the sheet and drop one in.
Read the dictionary of your era’s slang to recover lost worlds; read poetry to keep the ear tuned; walk and talk to an imaginary novice until the idea is explainable in plain sentences — then write it fast.
