45d Using parallel structures for emphasis and effect

45dUsing parallel structures for emphasis and effect

Parallel structures can help a writer emphasize a point, as Joan Didion does in this passage about people living in California’s San Bernardino Valley in the late 1960s:

Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.

—JOAN DIDION, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

The parallel phrases—Here is, Here is— introduce parallel details (the hot wind versus the cold; the old ways versus a new life style) that emphasize the emotional distance between here and the somewhere else that was once home for these new Californians.