Based on an extensive computer-aided examination of representative published American writing, this book examines and compares how various kinds of prose employ the diverse forms of parallelism. A scale of rhetorical value for assessing the cooccurring rhetorical devices of repetition is also presented. The chapters are entitled: "Balance or Imbalance?"; "Rhetoric and Parallel Matters"; "Definitions and Problems in a Broad Study"; "The Signals of Parallelism"; "Synthetic Sentences Versus Real Results"; "Doublets and 'Ocular Scan'"; "Deviation, Devices, and Classification"; "The Code and the Classification"; "Parallelism in Informative Prose: Findings"; "Parallelism in Imaginative Prose: Findings"; "Rank Order Listing of Parallelism and Rhetorical Devices"; "Rhetorical Values, Rhetorical Scores"; and "Style and Parallelism." A bibliography and five appendixes are also included. (LL)