Rhetorical figures of omission and excess
The figures of omission and excess work the connective tissue of a sentence. Asyndeton strips out the conjunctions; polysyndeton inserts more than grammar requires; ellipsis drops a word the reader can recover; aposiopesis breaks off altogether. Each figure manipulates the reader’s expectation of how clauses normally fit together, and each produces a felt effect — speed, weight, breathlessness, refusal — that a fully-connected sentence cannot produce.
These figures are the workhorses of two extreme stylistic tendencies in American prose: the minimalist line (Hemingway, Carver, McCarthy in his terser registers) and the maximalist line (McCarthy’s late prose, Faulkner, Pynchon). The same writer can shift between the two: McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men contains both Hemingway-clipped asyndeton and Blood Meridian-style polysyndetic floods, and that range is the secret of his rhythm.
For the Russian-speaking C2 student, asyndeton and polysyndeton interact in unexpected ways with Russian punctuation conventions. Russian comma rules permit asyndetic listing more readily than English; English wants either and between the last two or an Oxford comma. The figures of omission are therefore not “do what Russian does” — they are a deliberate departure from English’s default of full connection.
Rhetorical devices in prose — figures including parallelism and allusion (C1) Rhetorical devices and author's purpose (B2)Theory: the family of omission and excess
| Figure | Operation | Effect | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asyndeton | Remove conjunctions from a list | Speed, urgency, weight | I came, I saw, I conquered. |
| Polysyndeton | Add conjunctions where grammar does not require | Cumulation, weight, biblical sweep | And the rains came and the river rose and the bridge gave way and the road washed out. |
| Ellipsis (figure) | Omit a recoverable word | Compression, tightness | Some came to mourn; others, to celebrate. |
| Aposiopesis | Break off mid-sentence | Refusal, overwhelm, threat | Why I oughta — |
Quintilian treats these under figurae per detractionem (figures by subtraction) and per adiectionem (figures by addition). The Greek names matter less than the auditory effects each produces in English prose.
Asyndeton — the speed figure
Asyndeton (Greek asyndeton, “unbound”) removes the conjunctions a list or sequence would normally take. I came, I saw, I conquered (Caesar) is the canonical instance: the missing and before I conquered makes the third clause feel inevitable rather than additional.
In American prose, asyndeton has two main uses. First, it accelerates a sequence — a list of actions that should be felt as fast becomes faster without conjunctions. Second, it gives a list weight — the absence of and makes each item stand on its own, autonomous and equally heavy, rather than queueing behind a coordinator.
Consider Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), in the famous passage on what war does to language:
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
The asyndeton is in the closing list: the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Hemingway puts the and only before the dates — the rest is asyndetic. The effect is that each item in the list lands as equally weighted and equally surviving. With conjunctions throughout (villages, and roads, and rivers, and regiments, and dates) the list would feel cumulative; without them, the items stand as a roster, like the kind of inscriptions on the war monuments that are the subject of the passage.
Asyndeton in modern American oratory
A line attributed to multiple American politicians and modeled on Caesar:
We will defend our values. We will honor our allies. We will keep our word.
Three sentences in series with no and before the third. The figure produces the catalog of commitment rather than the queue of commitments. Asyndeton at sentence boundaries is the most common American deployment; asyndeton within a sentence’s comma-separated list is the second most common.
Polysyndeton — the figure of weight
Polysyndeton (Greek poly + syndeton, “many-bound”) adds conjunctions — usually and — where grammar would not require them. The effect is precisely the opposite of asyndeton’s speed: each conjunction is a small pause, a moment of accumulation, a beat in which the reader gathers the previous item before receiving the next.
The biblical source is constant. Genesis 1 in the King James Version begins with the formula And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. The repeated And is polysyndeton at scriptural scale, and through the King James Bible it became the dominant cadence of American prose for two centuries.
Cormac McCarthy is the modern master. From Blood Meridian (1985):
In the morning they rode on. The day broke gray and cold and the wind began to rise. They rode south through a country of bare gray plains and broken malpais and they crossed dry riverbeds where the water was gone and they came at last to a town where dogs slept in the dust and old women walked with their faces wrapped in shawls.
Notice the polysyndeton: gray and cold, bare gray plains and broken malpais, and they crossed, and they came. McCarthy refuses subordination — there are no because, while, although. The clauses link only by and, and the cumulative effect is biblical and exhausted: the day, the wind, the plains, the malpais, the riverbeds, the dust, the women, all on the same flat plane of and. The travelers ride through a world whose moral architecture has collapsed into mere succession, and the prose enacts that collapse by refusing to hierarchize the clauses.
The long McCarthy sentence is built almost entirely on polysyndeton. A famous one from Blood Meridian runs to over a page; its grammatical spine is and … and … and over and over. Hemingway-clipped asyndetic prose and McCarthy-flooded polysyndetic prose are the two poles of American sentence-rhythm.
Polysyndeton in argument
Polysyndeton is not exclusively literary. James Baldwin uses it in essays:
And it is not enough to deplore. And it is not enough to mourn. And it is not enough to commemorate. We must look, and we must speak, and we must answer.
The opening Ands of the first three sentences are polysyndetic at the sentence level — each begins with and, refusing to allow the prior sentence to be a stopping point. The closing and we must look, and we must speak, and we must answer is polysyndetic within the sentence. Two scales of the same figure.
Ellipsis (as figure) — recoverable omission
Ellipsis in the rhetorical sense is the omission of a word the reader can recover from context. It is distinct from the punctuation mark (”…”), which is a different phenomenon entirely.
Pope’s To err is human; to forgive, divine uses ellipsis after the semicolon — the missing is is recovered by the reader. The figure compresses the sentence by one word, but the compression is felt: the second half feels tighter than the first by exactly the amount of the missing copula.
Modern instance, paraphrasing a paragraph from Sontag: Photography democratized seeing; television, distraction. The dropped verb in the second half (democratized implied) is the figure. Without the ellipsis: Photography democratized seeing; television democratized distraction. — grammatical, longer, less aphoristic. With the ellipsis the figure has the shape of an epigram.
Aposiopesis — the break-off
Aposiopesis (Greek for “becoming silent”) is the figure of breaking off a sentence mid-thought. In American prose and dialogue it is marked with an em-dash. It carries one of three effects: overwhelm (the speaker cannot continue), threat (the unfinished sentence implies what would follow), or refusal (the speaker chooses not to complete).
A dialogue instance: If I find out who did this — (threat). A reflective-prose instance from a memoir: And then I realized — but no, I will not say what I realized then; it is not yet time. (refusal). An emotional instance from a witness statement: I heard the door, I saw him standing there, I — (overwhelm).
Aposiopesis is the rarest of these figures in argumentative prose because it depends on a felt moment of arrest; it works best in dialogue, monologue, and personal essay. In op-ed writing it usually misfires unless the writer has earned the right to the gesture.
The long McCarthy sentence — extended demonstration
To see polysyndeton at its full extent, consider a sentence in the spirit of McCarthy’s mature prose (this is constructed in his style to illustrate the figure; for the actual sentences see Blood Meridian pp. 247–248 and The Crossing p. 137):
They rode on through the evening and the sun fell behind the mountains and the sky went from gold to red to a strange thin pink that was not a color so much as the memory of one and then the night came up out of the east and the stars came down out of the night and there was no sound but the breathing of the horses and the small dry sounds of the leather and the men did not speak nor did they need to and the country opened before them in the dark like a great patient enormity that did not require their understanding nor seem to wish for it.
That is one sentence, with twelve ands and no subordinating conjunction. The polysyndeton refuses to hierarchize: the sun’s fall, the sky’s colors, the night, the stars, the silence, the leather, the men, the country — all on the same flat plane. The reader’s sense of time is dissolved into pure succession. This is the technical signature of late-McCarthy prose, and it is taught by reading him aloud until the rhythm enters the ear.
Production exercise
Write two paragraphs on the same subject — your route home, or your morning routine.
- Paragraph A: use asyndeton. Strip the conjunctions. Aim for a Hemingway-clipped catalog.
- Paragraph B: use polysyndeton. Add and between every clause. Aim for a McCarthy-style flood.
Read both aloud. Notice which content suits which figure. Polysyndeton suits cumulation, weight, exhaustion, ritual; asyndeton suits speed, urgency, command, inventory.
When the figures work vs misfire
Asyndeton works when the items are commensurate — when each list-element belongs to the same category and weight. Villages, roads, rivers, regiments, dates is commensurate (all are concrete proper-noun categories from the war record). A list mixing villages and theories and lunches breaks the figure.
Polysyndeton misfires when the writer has not earned the biblical register. A paragraph of polysyndetic prose on a mundane subject reads as parody of McCarthy. The figure carries weight; the content must deserve weight.
Aposiopesis misfires when over-used. A page with three em-dash breakoffs reads as melodrama. The figure works on the principle of rarity — one per piece, at most.
Common Russian-speaker mistakes
- Comma-splice asyndeton in English. Russian permits asyndetic listing with commas more readily than English. We came, we saw, we conquered is a famous case where English tolerates it (as a settled Caesar-quotation pattern), but in most modern English prose the asyndetic series at sentence level uses periods or semicolons: We came. We saw. We conquered. or We came; we saw; we conquered. Russian-speaker drafts default to commas and produce what an English editor reads as a comma splice.
- Polysyndeton applied to non-flood content. The temptation is to reach for and … and … and because it feels rhythmic; the result on technical or quotidian content is the McCarthy parody noted above. Polysyndeton wants weight; if the content is light, asyndeton or ordinary connection suits better.
- Mixing the figures within one paragraph. Asyndeton and polysyndeton are rhythmic opposites; using both in adjacent sentences confuses the ear. Pick one figure for a paragraph or for a passage.
- Forgetting the Oxford comma in asyndeton. American asyndetic catalogs in formal prose still take an Oxford comma before the final item if one is present: villages, roads, rivers, regiments, and dates. Russian-speaker drafts sometimes drop it; American conventions in journalism (AP) drop the Oxford, but in books and academic prose it stays.
- Aposiopesis as filler. The em-dash break-off is a marked gesture; using it as default to avoid finishing a sentence drains its force. Reserve it for genuine arrest of speech or thought.
- Confusing ellipsis (figure) with ellipsis (punctuation). The three-dot ”…” is a quotation-trimming or trailing-off mark; the figure of ellipsis is a deliberate omission of a recoverable word within a complete sentence. In a draft, the punctuation ellipsis often appears where the figure of ellipsis would be cleaner.
Summary
- Asyndeton removes conjunctions for speed and weight; polysyndeton adds them for cumulation and ritual.
- Hemingway and McCarthy are the two American poles; both writers use both figures, but tilt toward asyndeton (Hemingway) and polysyndeton (late McCarthy).
- Ellipsis (the figure) drops a recoverable word; aposiopesis breaks off the sentence.
- Polysyndeton imposes biblical weight; use it only when content can carry that weight.
- Asyndetic comma-lists in English at the sentence level usually want periods or semicolons, not commas — beware Russian comma defaults.
- Read passages aloud until the rhythm enters the ear; the figures are auditory before they are typographic.
Next lesson: Tropes: metaphor and its cousins — dead, live, and zombie metaphors; metonymy, synecdoche, conceptual metaphor; extending and mixing.