A Continuation from You Beautiful Pitch #1 & #2, how to make your pitch sound beautiful…..

Isocolon

This is a succession of sentences, phrases and clauses of grammatically equal length. For example: Mohammed Ali’s famous boast that he ‘floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee’ or John F. Kennedy saying ‘We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship’.

The isocolon can be extended, Winston Churchill took the isocolon really far with his speech on 27 January 1940 in Manchester that included:

‘Fill the armies, rule the air, pour out the munitions, strangle the U-boats, sweep the mines, plough the land, build the ships, guard the streets, succour the wounded, uplift the downcast, and honour the brave.’

Epizeuxis

This is the repetition of a word or phrase in immediate succession, for example estate agents like to say ‘location, location, location’ or as Tony Blair said, ‘education, education, education’.

It can make one word of phrase very memorable but it’s like a nuclear bomb, it should be used rarely.

“Education, education, education!”

Chiasmus

Here words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, for example ‘tea for two and two for tea’. It works particularly well when the inversion of the words also equals inversion of thought, for example, ‘ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’.