USE REPETITION FOR EFFECT

Communicators who use words in novel and memorable ways are much more persuasive.

When Lincoln spoke of:

"government of the people, by the people, for the people" at Gettysburg in 1863, he exploited a technique called stylized repetition. The impact "of the people, by the people, for the people", comes from the repetition of the same phrase at the end of successive phrases or sentences. In rhetoric, parallel like endings are called antistrophe or epistrophe.

The use of like beginnings is called anaphora or epanaphora. The most quoted lines from Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Address, delivered in 1865, created impact by repeating the beginnings of successive phrases:

"With malice toward none,

with charity for all, ...

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