Last month we identified the five best love poems to honor St. Patrick’s Day. This month, we examine the Rule of Three in celebration of good writing.
What Is the Rule of Three?
The Rule of Three is a writer’s guideline for conveying the most information in the briefest amount of space in the most effective way possible. The rule applies to characters in a story, words in a title, or adjectives in front of an idea. Advertisers use it for its brevity, poets for its rhythm, and comedians for their wit. Growing out of the oral tradition of story-telling, the Rule of Three possesses something of a mythic quality by enabling audiences to comprehend and remember concepts in a train of thought.
Examples
The Rule of Three appears everywhere:
- In folklore: The Three Little pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Three Billy Goats Gruff
- In literature: The Three Musketeers, the three ghosts which visit Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
- In religion: the Three Wise Men who visited Jesus after his birth, the three gods (Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma) of the Hindu religion, the three aspects of god in the Christian trinity.
Expressions and Catchphrases: Tom, Dick, & Harry–a phrase used to describe anyone or people of little consequence; “Turn on, tune in, drop out” phrase of the 1960s counter-culture movement; “Veni, vidi, Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered)” attributed to Julius Caesar.
Special Instances
The last set of examples above exemplifies the use of the tricolon in good writing. They achieve a symmetry of expression through the parallelism in their number of words or syllables and in the likeness of their concepts. Those progressions whose concepts increase in weight or magnitude are called ascending tricolons; those expressions that do the opposite are called descending tricolons. Bicolon (two) and Tetracolon (four) are other forms of this type of parallel expression.
Words of Warning
Enjoyable and succinct as these forms of expression are, an author should be careful in employing them in his/her writing. So many of this type of expression, the bicolon in particular, have crept into common usage that using them in an original text is considered lazy or unimaginative writing. Describing a story as “cloak and dagger” or a character as “tall, dark, and handsome” is as much a writing faux pas as opening a story with Snoopy’s sendup of Edward Bulwer Lytton‘s “It was a dark and stormy night.” And reversing the order of a common binomial expression like “law and order” or “bride and groom” is a particularly egregious errror unless intended for comedic effect.
What It All Comes Down To
Writing should be fun. For me as for most writers, nothing is so satisfying as stating our themes and ideas in a way that was “ne’er so well-expressed,” to borrow from the poet Alexander Pope. If you can compress a theme or idea into a rhythmic paralielism like the examples above–great. If knowing the concepts behind such constructions aids your writing so much the better. The measure of a writer is in doing so wisely and well. Not every Tom, Dick, or Harry can do it.
Are you up for that challenge? Tell us why or why not in the Leave a Reply section below.