Hints 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.

One of the easiest ways to help people remember a list is to put three items in it and to link them in some fashion. This is called using "triples," or more technically, "tricolon."

In the spirit of tricolon, here are three tricks for making the three items in a list more powerful:

Use climax: list the phrases by ascending importance of the items, or at least by increasing length. The phrases in the following example are six, six, and seven syllables long, and "dedicate" has the weakest meaning.
"we cannot dedicate --
we cannot consecrate --
we cannot hallow -- this ground."

Link the first two items to make the third stand out. In "The best physicians are Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman," the first two rhyme, and the third one doesn't. Notice the same in this aphorism from Ben Franklin:
"Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."

Ben Franklin's verse links the first two items with rhyme and the last two with alliteration.

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.

By: Thomas Christopher

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THOMAS CHRISTOPHER offers information on how to be a wit on the web page, How To Create Witty Sayings. He's trying out rhetorical techniques at his web T-shirt shop, WittySelfExpression.com.