A term you'll meet in rhetoric and sentence style.
Two opposite ways of handling conjunctions — and both are rhetorical figures:
Asyndeton (from the Greek for "unconnected") omits conjunctions between items in a list or between clauses: "I came, I saw, I conquered." No "and." The result is speed, compression, force. Each item lands separately, with its own weight.
Polysyndeton (from the Greek for "many connections") multiplies conjunctions: "And the rain fell, and the wind blew, and the floods came." The extra conjunctions slow the sentence down and give each element its own space. The effect is expansive, almost incantatory — time dilates.
Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici" is the ur-example: the absence of conjunctions makes the three acts feel simultaneous and inevitable, each collapsing into the next with no pause for breath or reflection. Three separate campaigns condensed into three syllables each. The asyndeton performs the speed and completeness of the conquest.
In prose, asyndeton creates urgency and economy. Hemingway uses it constantly in action sequences: "He shot the bull and the bull went down and he cut its ear off and put it in his pocket." Wait — that is actually polysyndeton (those "and"s are deliberate). Pure Hemingway asyndeton: "He saw it. He felt it. He said nothing." Three beats, no connective tissue. The compression suggests the character's emotional suppression as well as the prose's speed.
In lists, asyndeton signals that the list could go on indefinitely — there is no "and" to close it. When Whitman lists occupations in Song of Myself without conjunctions, the effect is of an open catalogue: the world is too large and various to be closed off with "and finally."
The King James Bible's characteristic style is heavily polysyndetic: "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." Each "and" is a breath, a pause, a moment before the next thing comes into being. The polysyndeton enacts the deliberateness of creation — nothing hurries.
Polysyndeton is the natural rhythm of oral storytelling and of children's narrative: "And then we went to the park and there was a dog and he chased the ball and I fell over and it was funny." The conjunctions hold the sequence together without imposing hierarchy; everything is equally "and then."
In literary prose, polysyndeton can create a sense of overwhelming accumulation — things piling up faster than they can be processed — or of dreamy suspension, as in biblical repetition. Which effect dominates depends on context and pace.
Writers often use both figures in proximity for contrast. A passage of polysyndeton — slow, expansive, accumulative — followed by asyndeton — sharp, clipped, decisive — is a classic rhetorical rhythm: the build-up and the punch. Hemingway's Nick Adams stories sometimes do this: long compound sentences connected by "and" (polysyndeton) followed by a short declarative with no conjunction at all.
Both figures are ways of controlling how readers experience time in a sentence. Asyndeton compresses; polysyndeton expands. Both draw attention to the structure of the list or sequence itself — not just what the items are, but how they relate. Removing conjunctions implies independence and speed; multiplying them implies connection and accumulation. The question is always: what is the writer doing with time here, and why?
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