Mark Forsyth is a writer and linguist who studies the rhetorical formulas behind memorable lines in literature, speeches, advertising, and pop culture. His book Elements of Eloquence catalogs these techniques, showing how ancient rhetorical devices are still the hidden engine of the phrases we remember most. The conversation explores why these formulas work, how they shape memory and emotion, and how any writer can practice and use them.
Why rhetorical formulas matter
Humans are not purely rational — we are moved by rhythm, symmetry, and pattern. Rhetorical devices exploit this by shaping language into forms the brain naturally latches onto.
These formulas have been identified for over 2,500 years, yet modern education has largely abandoned the study of rhetoric, treating writing as something that should be spontaneous and uncalculated. Forsyth argues this is a mistake: the Romantics used rhetoric constantly, and passion works best when channeled through structure.
The technical names for these devices (chiasmus, anadiplosis, tricolon, etc.) don’t matter — what matters is learning the patterns and practicing them until they become instinctive.
Progressio — antithesis as a structural engine
Progressio is a long series of antitheses — pairing opposites in sequence to create a sense of completeness and memorability.
Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Ecclesiastes: “A time to weep and a time to rejoice, a time to build and a time to cast down…”
Church of England marriage vows: “For richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health…”
Katy Perry’s “Hot n Cold”: “You’re hot then you’re cold, you’re yes then you’re no…”
The technique dramatizes the fullness of a concept. Saying “everybody” is forgettable; saying “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” (as Martin Luther King Jr. did) forces the reader to stop and consider.
It also functions as a signal to the reader: the repetition and building pattern tells the audience “pay attention — this is important.” Without variation in intensity, writing becomes flat, just as a bass drop without a buildup is boring.
Diacope — the verbal sandwich
Diacope repeats a word with a small interruption, creating emphasis and memorability.
“Bond, James Bond”
“To be or not to be”
“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last”
“Alone, alone, all, all alone” (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
“Burn baby burn” (Disco Inferno)
“Home sweet home”
The pattern is so powerful that it can alter memory. In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch never says “Fly, my pretties, fly” — she just says “fly” repeatedly — but audiences remember it as a diacope because the brain expects and reconstructs the pattern.
Chiasmus — symmetry in reverse
Chiasmus says something and then reverses the structure, creating a symmetrical sentence that feels inherently true.
JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
JFK: “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”
Coolio: “With money on my mind and my mind on money.”
George W. Bush: “If we cannot bring our enemies to justice, we must bring justice to our enemies.”
Obama: “You stood up for America; now America must stand up for you.”
Humans love symmetry — in architecture (the Taj Mahal, St Paul’s Cathedral) and in language. Chiasmus makes a sentence feel balanced and therefore correct, which is why so many politicians use it.
Forsyth has never seen these devices overused. Even when the audience recognizes the technique, it doesn’t diminish the effect — especially in grand or emotional contexts.
Epistrophe and anaphora — repetition at the edges
Epistrophe repeats words at the end of successive clauses; anaphora repeats them at the beginning.
Churchill: “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the fields, we will fight them in the cities…”
Obama: “Yes we can” repeated at the end of multiple sentences.
Kipling’s “If”: a long series of conditional clauses (“If you can…”) holding back the main verb until the very end — a periodic sentence that builds tension and release.
These techniques create momentum and signal importance through sheer structural insistence.
Tricolon — the magic of three
Humans love groups of three. A tricolon arranges three elements to create a sense of completeness and a natural conclusion.
“I came, I saw, I conquered”
“The good, the bad, and the ugly”
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”
Martini’s slogan: “Anytime, anyplace, anywhere” (where the last two are essentially the same word — the brain doesn’t mind)
Even simple repetition of a word three times works: “Location, location, location” (real estate); “Howl, howl, howl” (King Lear).
Churchill’s famous line is remembered as “blood, sweat, and tears” — but the original was “blood, sweat, toil, and tears.” The brain corrected it to a tricolon because three feels more complete.
Anadiplosis — chaining clauses
Anadiplosis repeats the last word of one clause as the first word of the next, creating a chain of logic or escalation.
Yoda: “Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger. Anger leads to the dark side.”
Paul McCartney’s “Here, There and Everywhere”: “To lead a better life, I need my love to be here… here, making each day of the year…”
Forsyth examined McCartney’s original manuscripts at the British Library and found that McCartney added the anadiplosis deliberately in revision — even if he didn’t know the technical term.
Epanalepsis — bookending verses
Epanalepsis begins and ends a verse or passage with the same word.
The Beatles’ “Yesterday”: each verse starts and ends with “yesterday.”
“Imagine” uses a related technique — starting each sentence with “imagine” (anaphora).
Polyptoton — using one word in multiple forms
Polyptoton takes a word and uses it in different grammatical forms (noun, verb, adjective) within the same passage.
“To be a light to lighten the Gentiles” (noun → verb)
“Give us this day our daily bread” (noun → adjective)
Shakespeare: “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds” (verb → noun); “Bends with the remover to remove” (noun → verb)
Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”: “The haters gonna hate hate hate, the players gonna play play play play”
The technique makes language feel layered and memorable without adding new content.
Adynaton — listing impossible things
Adynaton expresses devotion or commitment by listing things that will never happen.
“I’ll love you till China and Africa meet, and the river jumps over the mountain, and the salmon sing in the street… till the oceans are folded and hung up to dry” (from a love poem)
Equivalent to “until hell freezes over”
Isocolon and balanced halves
Isocolon constructs a sentence in two perfectly balanced halves.
Alexander Pope: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
“Roses are red, violets are blue”
The symmetry makes the line feel complete and quotable.
Alliteration — Shakespeare as thief and improver
Shakespeare was a “brilliant thief” — he borrowed plots and passages from sources like Plutarch, then transformed them by adding alliteration and converting prose into iambic pentameter.
Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra’s barge became: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water… the winds were lovesick with them… silver the oars…”
“Full fathom five thy father lies” means the same as “your father is 9.8 meters underwater” — but the alliteration makes it poetry.
Shakespeare’s form was often more original than his content. He took existing material and made it dramatically better through sound and rhythm.
How to practice — writing as jazz
Forsyth compares writing to jazz: musicians spend years practicing scales and harmonic techniques so they can improvise freely on stage. Writers should do the same.
Practice iambic pentameter — the basic verse form of English. Shakespeare wrote almost everything in it. Practice by improvising nonsense: “The chair is on the carpet in the room.” It doesn’t need to mean anything; the goal is to internalize the rhythm.
Once you can write in iambic pentameter, prose becomes easier. As Alexander Pope said: “They walk best who have learned to dance.”
Forsyth recommends having a personal “cheat sheet” of formulas with examples, since the technical names don’t matter — only the patterns do.
Writing process — preparation, then speed
Forsyth prepares extensively before writing: walking, thinking, organizing facts and structure in his head. Then he writes as fast as possible.
Fast writing preserves flow — if it flows out of the writer, it flows into the reader. Slow, self-conscious editing mid-draft kills the voice.
For non-fiction, he talks to an imaginary non-expert person in the room, explaining the subject out loud. If he can explain it clearly to someone who doesn’t know the subject, he’s ready to write.
Editing: he mostly just reads for typos. If a passage doesn’t work rhythmically, he deletes it entirely and starts over rather than trying to fix it sentence by sentence — like taking a running jump, failing, going back, and trying again.
Voice — the establishing shot
Writing lacks tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures. The writer must recreate all of that from scratch.
The first paragraph (or first page) must do enormous work: it establishes the writer’s voice, geographic location, social register, and tone. Until the reader has this, they hear a flat, generic voice — like a machine announcement.
Simple word choices establish voice instantly: “A man was walking down the street” is voiceless; “A chap was walking down the street” is English and posh; “A dude was walking down the street” is American; “A gentleman was sauntering down the street” is something else entirely.
Once voice is established quickly, the writer can relax and maintain it consistently.
Language evolution — texting and informality
Texting has made writing far more central to daily life than it was in the 1980s, when communication was mostly phone calls and TV.
Early mobile phone texting (with numeric keypads) forced extreme brevity — a “lapidary style” similar to carving words in stone. Smartphones removed that constraint, allowing longer, more casual messages.
Internet communication (texts, Twitter) feels more like spoken language — colloquial, jovial, informal — and this is pushing language evolution toward greater casualness.
Word meanings shift rapidly online. “Troll,” “browser,” “spam” — all have completely different meanings than they did 30 years ago, and users adapted without noticing.
Poetry that breaks logic
Many of the most beloved lines in English poetry make no logical or grammatical sense — and that’s precisely why they resonate.
Blake: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night” — what are “forests of the night”? It means nothing technically but evokes everything.
Milton’s “Lycidas”: “There entertain him all the saints above / In solemn troops and sweet societies / Singing in their glory move / And wipe the tears forever from his eyes” — the grammar barely holds together, but it feels like heaven.
Academic truth follows logic (A, B, C; 1, 2, 3). Poetry that moves the human heart often breaks that form entirely.
Slang dictionaries as historical records
Forsyth loves old slang dictionaries because they preserve entire forgotten ways of life.
18th-century highwaymen’s slang is full of terms for being hanged (“dancing on nothing,” “hearty choke for breakfast”) — reflecting how common execution was in their world.
Rural dialect dictionaries from the 1840s contain terms for horses, barns, woodlands, and wildflowers — a whole vanished landscape of meaning.
A word like “gongle” (to stare idly at a canal) was thought to be extinct until Forsyth mentioned it in his book The Horologicon and received letters from houseboat communities on canals who still use it regularly.
Studying which words entered the dictionary in a given year could reveal the history of that era — Vietnam War slang (“snafu,” “gook,” “pow”) is one example.
Jerry Seinfeld’s rhetorical ping-pong
The episode closes with an example from a Jerry Seinfeld New York Times article about getting his first apartment in Manhattan in 1976.
The introduction ping-pongs between positive and negative emotions: excitement → dog crap on the streets → signing the lease → car towed → “This is the greatest place I’ve ever been.”
In just two sentences, Seinfeld breaks the frame of a serious newspaper article, creates tension, releases it, and makes the reader laugh twice — a miniature emotional odyssey built on the same antithetical structures discussed throughout the episode.
