 OUPblog The rule of three
2026-01-31 13:30 UTC by Cassandra Ammerman The rule of three I’ve been reading S. Jay Keyser’s fascinating book Play It Again Sam, which (despite its waggish title) is a serious and insightful study of the role of repetition in the verbal, musical, and visual arts. The key idea is that repetition is both efficient and pleasurable, setting up patterns that reinforce linguistic structure and create aesthetic impact. Part of the book deals with the “rule of three” and the role that triples play in capturing and focusing our attention, providing rhythm, and making things memorable and surprising. Take a second and think of some tripled up phrases if you can. My list included these tricolonic phrases, in which the repetition builds the list in significance: Vini, vidi, vici Friends, Romans, countrymen Reduce, reuse, recycle Government of the people, by the people, for the people we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman. The number three shows its rhetorical impact in a number of places. It’s in jokes (“A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar …”), folklore (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”) and advertising (“Snap, Crackle, Pop). The stereotypical five-paragraph essay, which is still taught in some places, consists of an introductory paragraph, a concluding paragraph and three body paragraphs. And its paragraphs are often made up of topic sentence, a concluding sentence, and at least three supporting sentences. In prose, tricolons show up in sentences where triples are used to build emphasis. Sometimes a simple bicolon is too little and a tetracolon is too exhausting. Here are a few from recent reading. In Annie Lowrey’s essay about avoiding microplastic, “I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won” in The Atlantic (August 2025), in one sentence we find a compound noun phrase with three parts, where the second echoes the first and the third expands the idea: Scientists have found plastic in brains, eyeballs, and pretty much every other organ. In another sentence, the triple goes down the body, from the eyes to the groin: We cry plastic tears, leak plastic breast milk, and ejaculate plastic semen. Triples can pack a lot into a small space as the compound subject of a gerund: Concerns over plastic exposure have exploded in recent years, with podcast bros, MAHA types, and crunchy moms joining environmentalists (and a number of physicians and scientists) in attempting to ditch the substance. And they can even be used to organize longer lists in to rhythmic triples of pairs of adjectives: Plastics are amazing. The synthetic polymers are light and inexpensive, moldable and waterproof, stretchy and resilient. Compare that last one to the same sentence with “light, inexpensive, moldable, waterproof, stretchy, and resilient.” You’d be snoring before you get to the end. If you stop, look, and listen, you find tricolons everywhere. Look for them. Featured image by Adriano on Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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