The Decision of Sand-pears is a dramatic poetic form intended to amuse the audience concerning someone's character, originating in The Practical Atrocity. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single quatrain. Use of alliteration and consonance is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines reverse grammatical structures. The fourth line of the quatrain is required to maintain the phrasing of the second line. The second line of the quatrain uses the same placement of allusions as the first line. The first line has ten syllables. The second line has eight syllables. The third line has seven syllables. The fourth line has seven syllables.