negative-positive restatement

A method of achieving emphasis by stating an idea twice, first in negative terms and then in positive terms.

An obvious variation on this method is to make the positive statement first and then the negative.

See also:

• Antithesis
• Chiasmus
• Effective Rhetorical Strategies of Repetition
• Repetition

Examples and Observations:

• "It's not pining, it's passed on! This parrot is no more!"
  (John Cleese, "The Dead Parrot Sketch." Monty Python's Flying Circus, episode 8)



• "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.
  
  "My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
  (President John Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961)



• "Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are--but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation,' a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."
  (President John Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961)



• "You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case."
  (Ken Kesey, quoted in Esquire, 1970)



• "People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them."
  (John Dos Passos, The New York Times, Oct. 25, 1959)



• "The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. . . . No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken, let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal."
  (Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 1938)



• "Waking is the wrong word for what I did that morning. There was no emergence from darkness, there was no jolt into consciousness. I didn't wake up as such--my disease just got this new open-eyed, standing-up symptom. I drank some water. It felt as though the first few mouthfuls were absorbed straight into the hard dry sponge of my tongue. I made coffee easily enough but then poured it into the ashtray. I lit the filter end of two consecutive cigarettes."
  (Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street. Arcade, 1997)



• "I am not thinking of philosophy as courses in philosophy or even as a subject exclusive of other subjects. I am thinking of it in its old Greek sense, the sense in which Socrates thought of it, as the love and search for wisdom, the habit of pursuing an argument where it leads, the delight in understanding for its own sake, the passionate pursuit of dispassionate reasonableness, the will to see things steadily and to see them whole."
  (Brand Blanshard, The Uses of a Liberal Education. Alcove Press, 1974)



• Negative-Positive Restatement
  "Here emphasis is achieved by stating an idea twice, first in negative terms, then in positive:

  Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.
  _{James Baldwin}
  
  This is more than poetic insight; it is hallucination.
  _{J.C. Furnas}
  
  The poor are not like everyone else. They are a different kind of people. They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class looks upon.
  _{Michael Harrington}

  Generally the same sentence contains both the negative and positive statements (as in the first two examples here). In an extended passage, negative and positive may be expressed in separate sentences (the third example).
  
  Less commonly the progression may be from positive to negative, as in this sentence by G.K. Chesterton about social conventions:

  Conventions may be cruel, they may be unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene, but there is one thing they never are. Conventions are never dead.

  All this could be put more briefly:

  Although conventions may be cruel, unsuitable, or even grossly superstitious or obscene, they are never dead.

  But not put so well."
  (Thomas S. Kane, The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing. Berkley Books, 2000)



• Peter Elbow on "Natural" Language
  "I defend the term 'natural.' Surely it's the right word for language that comes to the tongue and mind without effort or planning. I'm not saying that culture doesn't shape what comes naturally to tongue and mind. I'm not saying that the same kind of language will be natural from one person or culture to another. But since we speak long before we write, the language that comes most easily to tongue and mind will tend to have features characteristic of speech (though not always). When language is careful and planned, it often sounds different from language that is less planned. Listeners or readers usually hear the planning or effort or lack of ease. It's not surprising that people often remark on language as sounding natural or not."
  (Peter Elbow, "Discourses." Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching, by Peter Elbow. Oxford Univ. Press, 2000)