A showy device, if you can manage it, antimetabole is a rhetorical device that sets two parallel phrases against each other while inverting the position of key words.
The antimetabole structure looks like this:
A…B / B…A
A simple example would be:
I know what I like, and I like what I know.
“I know” and “I like” exchange places in this parallel structure, rotating around the “what.”
In her great book Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion, Jeanne Fahnestock observes that antimetabole makes claims of “identity and causal reciprocity.”
This idea of “causal reciprocity” is a feature of my favorite architecture quotes:
“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Winston Churchill
Though Churchill is overstating the power of architecture just a bit (to the lasting delight of designers everywhere), the rhetorical effect is powerful.
As Fahnestock notes, the most famous antimetabole in English is not proper antimetabole at all, but rather a corrective antimetabole. The structure is:
Not A…B, but B…A
The example, of course, is JFK’s famous request:
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
Taylor Coe 