Eutrepismus
Numbering your points aloud so the audience can count them with you.
Eutrepismus is the figure of enumerating points in explicit order: 'First... second... third...'. The Greek root means 'making ready' or 'putting in good order', and the device does exactly that — it hands the audience a structure before it hands them the content.
Its usefulness is cognitive rather than decorative. A listener who knows there are three points can allocate attention and detect when one is missing; a reader given the same signposts can navigate a long argument. Classical rhetoricians treated it as part of dispositio, the arrangement of material, and it remains standard in legal argument, sermons, and technical writing.
The figure combines well with parallelism: enumerated points that share a grammatical shape are markedly easier to hold than points that each arrive in a different construction. It also creates a debt — announce four reasons and deliver three, and the audience will remember the gap rather than the argument.
Common mistake: numbering points that are not parallel in importance, so 'third' turns out to be a minor caveat. Enumeration implies equivalence; use it only when the items really are comparable units.
“First, I do not have the money; second, I do not have the time; third, and most importantly, I do not have the inclination.”
Keep reading the glossary
A rhetorical structure of three parallel clauses, phrases, or words — the most persuasive number in English.
A rhetorical scheme in which successive clauses have the same length and grammatical structure.
A figure in which points already made are gathered and restated in a compressed rush at the end of an argument.
A figure in which successive clauses ascend in intensity, each building on the last.