CHIASMUS AND HEBREW POETRY

This 13th Post gives a little background about a type of Hebrew poetry known as chiasmus. I've included examples in several of the previous Posts. Read my 1995 article about English and Hebrew Poetry.

The word chiasm comes from the appearance of these structures, which is like the left half of an X. Chi is the name of the Greek letter X.

You can also think of this kind of poetry as a reflection.

I don't know who took this beautiful photo.

As long as I'm discussing poetry, I'll put in a plug for good writing style.

First, I like simplicity. I abhor gobbledygook. Here is an example from the preface of an actual book.

If you are like me, you probably don't think a whole lot about the air you breathe unless, for some reason, it smells bad. However, our air is quite special. It contains 21% oxygen, and ours is the only world we know of (at least so far) with such elevated amounts. This is good for us because we are large animals and we need lots of oxygen to live. So also do our furry friends, cats and dogs, as well as the cows, chickens, sheep, pigs, and other animals on which we base much of our diet. Oxygen burns the fuel that heats our homes, and allows the warm glow of a campfire on a crisp autumn evening. In short, oxygen is a signature feature of Earth; the high levels in our atmosphere define the outlines of our existence, as they also generally define the nature of animal life on Earth.

I really LIKE the book I got that paragraph from, so I've been rewriting it without the unnecessary words to make it more accessible. So far, I've "degobbledygooked" 95 pages down to 72 pages. Here is the paragraph without the gobbledygook.

You probably don't think about the air you breathe unless it smells bad. Air contains 21% oxygen. Breathing the oxygen in air keeps us, our pets, and the animals we eat as food alive.

Second, I like information density. The reader shouldn't have to go through half a page of text to find one item of information.

Third, I like organization. Some articles look like the author wrote all his ideas on 3X5 cards, shuffled them, and then typed up the article in the order of the shuffled cards. This is especially true of newspaper articles!

I try to avoid writing in those ways. How am I doing?

One other thing that seriously annoys me about Internet articles is the use of teensy-weensy text or text that doesn't contrast well with the background, making it hard to read.