Asyndenton

A friend passed on this Dynamist review of "Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style," by Virginia Tufte.

"It is syntax that gives words the power to relate to each other in a sequence, to create rhythms andn emphasis, to carry meaning--of whatever kind--as well as glow individually in just the right stuff," writes Tufte. She has collected hundreds of sentences to illustrate how effective writers use specific techniques to create desired effects. She has a whole chapter on appositives and another on parallelism.

Virginia Postrel was excited to learn the meaning of asyndenton, as am I. It's stringing together words without using conjunctions: We use words like honor, code, loyalty. It's a device I see often (and have been known to employ myself when feeling floopy), but I never knew it had a name.