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Stanley Fish has written a masterful column for the NY Times analyzing the inaugural address and has some really good points to make about the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis.  Here is a bit of what he said:

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.

Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.

To properly understand what Dr. Fish is trying to explain, you really should read the whole article here, as it is a great followup to our class discussion of parallelism.  Parallelism is a building block of style, but subordination (creating a hierarchy of ideas, ie. hypotaxis) and coordination (sticking ideas of equal emphasis together, ie. parataxis) are really powerful ways to organize an argument.