What is Polysyndeton?
Using multiple conjunctions in close succession.
The Power of Repetition: Polysyndeton in Creative Writing
Polysyndeton is a rhetorical device where conjunctions are used in succession to create a sense of urgency, rhythm, and emphasis in a sentence or passage.
Using polysyndeton, writers can convey a powerful sense of continuity and repetition, linking phrases together in a way that conveys a sense of momentum or even obsession with a particular idea. For example:
'I ate pizza and breadsticks and garlic knots and salad and soda and cookies and ice cream.'
The repetition of 'and' allows us to feel the maximum impact of this feast and the euphoria of indulgence.
Polysyndeton can be used to great effect in writing to create a particular rhythm or cadence, or to highlight certain words or ideas. However, it should be used selectively, as too much polysyndeton can make a text feel repetitive, tedious, or even cluttered.
Here are a couple of examples of how authors have used polysyndeton in their works.
'They were filthy and whole. They had been laid away in drawers, tied in sheets, in a closet which smelled of shoe-polish and camphor, and moth-balls, for perhaps twenty-five years, and since then they had been in the shed where instruments are kept, under the back porch, smelling of pinewood and rain, waiting: waiting for me.'
'In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas, sharply peaked with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and further back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.'