Rule of three (writing)

The Three Bears

The rule of three or power of three is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things.^[1] The reader or audience of this form of text is also thereby more likely to remember the information. This is because having three entities combines both brevity and rhythm with having the smallest amount of information to create a pattern.^[2][3] It makes the author or speaker appear knowledgeable while being both simple and catchy.

Slogans, film titles and a variety of other things have been structured in threes, a tradition that grew out of oral storytelling.^[4] Examples include the Three Little Pigs, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and the Three Musketeers. Similarly, adjectives are often grouped in threes to emphasize an idea.

The Latin phrase "omne trium perfectum" (everything that comes in threes is perfect, or, every set of three is complete) conveys the same idea as the rule of three.

Meaning

The rule of three can refer to a collection of three words, phrases, sentences, lines, paragraphs/stanzas, chapters/sections of writing and even whole books.^[3][5] The three elements together are known as a triad.^[6] The technique may be used not just in prose but poetry, oral storytelling, films and advertising. In photography the rule of thirds produces a similar effect by dividing an image into three vertically and horizontally.^[7]

A tricolon is a more specific use of the rule of three where three words or phrases are equal in length and grammatical form.^[8]

A hendiatris is a figure of speech where three successive words are used to express a single central idea.^[6] As a slogan or motto, this is known as a tripartite motto.^[9]

Slogans and catchphrases

Many advertising campaigns and public information slogans use the technique to create a catchy, memorable way of displaying information. In marketing theory, American advertising and sales pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis laid out his three chief copywriting principles, which he felt were crucial for effective advertising:

"The mission of an advertisement is to attract a reader, so that he will look at the advertisement and start to read it; then to interest him, so that he will continue to read it; then to convince him, so that when he has read it he will believe it. If an advertisement contains these three qualities of success, it is a successful advertisement."

Better-known examples include:

• A Mars a day helps you to work, rest and play^[10] - Mars advertising slogan since 1959
• Stop, Look and Listen^[11][12] - A public road and level crossing safety slogan
• Liberté, égalité, fraternité^[13] - The slogan of the French Republic predating 1790
• Faster, Higher, Stronger^[14] - The Olympic motto; a translation of the Latin Citius, Altius, Fortius
• Stop, drop and roll

Comedy

In comedy, it is also called a comic triple.^[15] The third element is often used to create an effect of surprise with an audience, especially if it differs from the first two.^[3] For instance, jokes might feature three stereotyped individuals—such as an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman; or a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead—where the surprise or punchline of the joke comes from the third character.

Fairy tales

In storytelling in general, authors often create triplets or structures in three parts. In its simplest form, this is merely beginning, middle, and end, from Aristotle's Poetics. Syd Field wrote a popular handbook of screenwriting, in which he touted the advantages of three-act structure over the more traditional five-act structure used by William Shakespeare and many other famous playwrights.

Snow White receives three visits from her wicked stepmother

Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folk Tale, concluded that any of the elements in a folk tale could be negated twice, so that it would repeat thrice.^[16] This is common not only in the Russian tales he studied, but throughout folk tales and fairy tales—most commonly, perhaps, in that the youngest son is usually the third, but fairy tales often display the rule of three in the most blatant form, a small sample of which includes:

• Rumpelstiltskin spins thrice for the heroine and lets her guess his name thrice over a period of three days.
• In East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the heroine receives three gifts while she is searching for her lost husband; when she finds where he is prisoner, she must use them to thrice bribe her way to the hero (the first two times she was unable to tell her story because he lay in a drugged sleep).
• In Brother and Sister, Brother is transformed into a deer when he drinks from the third stream that their wicked stepmother enchanted, and when Sister is killed by the same stepmother, she visits her child's room thrice, being caught and restored the third time.
• In The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird, a woman says she will bear the king three marvelous children; when they reappear, their envious aunts attempt to kill them by sending them on three quests, after the three marvelous things of the title.
• In The Silent Princess, a prince breaks a peasant woman's pitcher thrice, and is cursed; when he finds the title princess, he must persuade her to speak thrice.
• In The Love for Three Oranges, the hero picks three magical oranges, and only with the third is able to keep the woman who springs out of it.

Literature

• In Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Marley's Ghost tells Ebenezer Scrooge he will receive visits from three spirits: The Ghost of Christmas Past, The Ghost of Christmas Present, and finally The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, to which Scrooge says, "Spirit, I fear you most of all."
• In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye must give his three eldest daughters away, one after another. Each match progressively challenges his faith, as represented by a monologue in which he argues with himself using the phrase "on the other hand" to play the devil's advocate and convince himself to side with his daughters. This is subverted with the youngest daughter who wishes to marry outside the faith. For which Tevye concludes that "No, there is no other hand."

Rhetoric and public speaking

The use of a series of three elements is also a well-known feature of public oratory. Max Atkinson, in his book on oratory entitled Our Masters' Voices,^[17] gives interesting examples of how public speakers use three-part phrases to generate what he calls 'claptraps', evoking audience applause.

Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist and preacher, was known for his uses of tripling and the rule of three throughout his many influential speeches. For example, the speech "Non-Violence and Racial Justice" contained a binary opposition made up of the rule of three: "insult, injustice and exploitation," followed a few lines later by "justice, good will and brotherhood."^[18] Conversely, segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace inveighed: "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" during his 1963 inaugural address.^[19]

The appeal of the three-fold pattern is illustrated by the transformation of Winston Churchill's reference to "blood, toil, tears and sweat" (echoing Garibaldi and Theodore Roosevelt) in popular recollection to "blood, sweat and tears."^[20][21] Similarly, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan describes the importance of community, without which life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". This has been reduced to the commonly heard triad "nasty, brutish and short."

The Welsh Triads and Irish Triads suggest the use of threes was also a mnemonic device—easy-to-learn verses that were pointers to other information also committed to memory by Druids.

Law

A common feature of legal documents which give property or grant rights as drafted by legal professionals perpetuates old English practice in which the rule of three echoes the intended Act by the varying restatement of the act in triplicate. For example, in a Will or Trust instrument the phrase "I give, devise and bequeath ..."

Oath by a witness in a US court proceeding is asked to "tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".^[22]

See also

• Hendiatris (or tripartite motto)
• Tricolon
• The Three Classic Laws of thought
• Hegel#Triads
• Triple deity
• Rule of thirds; a similar concept applied to visual art

References