Parallelism: The Tightest Beat

Just for fun, here's a definition:
parallel structure: in writing, refers to identical grammatical structures that add rhythm and balance to images.

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Why is it important for images to have balance and rhythm? What difference does that make?"

Look at this:

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call...THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Rod Serling wrote this, and it was read at the beginning of each episode of The Twilight Zone. The parallelism adds a rhythm to it that is so mesmerizing, that people still remember it and can recite it to this day. It has also been imitated many times, as for instance, in the movie 12 Monkeys: Between the past and the future, between sanity and madness, between dreams and reality, lies the mystery of the 12 Monkeys.

Parallelism is not so much about grammatical correctness, as it is about something sounding good. As writers, we should use the structures of our language to create rhythm, sort of like a background beat.

For this post, I want you to find a good example of parallelism. Now, don't panic, because you can't get this wrong. Well, unless you don't do it...but that's not going to happen. You need to look for passages that you've read, or heard, that have something about them that repeats. It could be a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a structure that appears over and over, adding that little something extra special, beyond the words themselves: rhythm.