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people starving in the world — and there are — it is not caused by insufficient information. If crime is rampant in the streets, it is not caused by insufficient information. If children are abused and wives are battered, that has nothing to do with insufficient information. If our schools are not working and democratic principles are losing their force, that too has nothing to do with insufficient information. If we are plagued by such problems, it is because something else is missing.
    By repeating those conditional "If" clauses and ending four consecutive sentences with "insufficient information," Postman sounds a drumbeat of language, a drumline of persuasion.
    Suddenly I began to see parallels everywhere. Here is a passage from The Plot Against America, a novel by Philip Roth. In one of his trademark long sentences, Roth describes Jewish American working-class life in the 1940s:
    The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidy
    ing closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family's books while simultaneously attending to their children's health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.
    In this dazzling inventory of work, I count nineteen parallel phrases, all building on "washing laundry." (And look at all those -ings. ) But here's Roth's secret: what makes the passage sing is the occasional variation of the pattern, such as the phrase "cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves." Roth could have written, "The men worked fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week," a perfectly parallel string of adjectives. Instead, he gives us "even seventy or more." By breaking the pattern, he lends more emphasis to the final element.
    A pure parallel construction would be "Boom, boom, boom." Parallelism with a twist gives us "Boom, boom, bang." A pattern with variation created these now familiar phrases and titles:
    Hither, thither, and yon Wynken, Blynken, and Nod Father, Son, and Holy Ghost Peter, Paul, and Mary Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll
    Superman, we all remember, stands not for truth, justice, and patriotism, but "truth, justice, and the American way," two parallel nouns with a twist.
    Such intentional violation of parallelism adds power to the conclusion of King's speech:
    Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! [That follows the pattern.] But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
    Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every
    mountainside, let freedom ring.
    When King points the compass of freedom toward the segregationist South, he alters the pattern. Generalized American topography is replaced by specific locations associated with racial injustice: Stone Mountain and Lookout Mountain. The final variation covers not just mighty mountains, but every bump of Mississippi.
    All writers fail, on occasion, to take advantage of parallel structures. The result for the reader can be the equivalent of driving over a pothole on a freeway. What if Saint Paul taught us that the three great virtues were faith, hope, and committing ourselves to charitable work? What if Abraham Lincoln had written about a government of the people, by the people, and for the entire nation, including the red and blue states? These violations of parallelism should remind us of the exquisite balance of the original versions.
    WORKSHOP
    1. Examine your recent work with parallelism in mind. Look for examples in