TRICKS FOR USING TRIPLES
It's important to speakers to make their words memorable. Readers can always go back and reread a passage if they don't remember what it said, but listeners cannot go back and re-listen. Listeners will easily forget what was said before while listening to what is being said now. To have an audience remember your point, it is important for your words to be arranged in a memorable fashion.
Often you will need to give a list of things. The easiest way to make a list of items memorable is also one of the most effective. Use three items in a list unless there is some good reason to do otherwise, preferably three different aspects of what you're talking about. This technique has been known since classical times under the name tricolon.
But simply putting three things in a list does not do everything you need. It works best if the three items are linked in some way. For example, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." --Churchill
In the spirit of tricolon, here are three tricks for making the three items in a list more powerful:
Use alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds, particularly in stressed syllables. You can find candidates for this just by looking in a thesaurus. Suppose we want to use a triple to say, "It was a time of joy." Here's what I found in under two minutes in a thesaurus:
"It was a time of gaiety, gladness, and glee,"
"a time of blessedness, beatitude, and bliss,"
"a time of ecstasy, exuberance, and exaltation."
Use anticlimax of length, ending the list with a shorter phrase, to give the list a punch, as in "gaiety, gladness, and glee" and "blessedness, beatitude, and bliss." We expect climax, increasing importance or length of the items. Anticlimax gains attention by violating that expectation.
Use anticlimax of importance for humor: make the first two items significant or serious and the final item trivial and light.
"Due to the blizzard
50,000 households lost their electricity;
cities and town across three states ran short of food, fuel, and medicine;
and I didn't get my newspaper for two whole days."
Using three items in the list goes a great deal of the way, but making those items fit together is important to get the most use out of tricolon.
posted by TC @ 8:37 PM
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