Literary technique: polysyndeton

Before I even knew what polysyndeton was, this technique was one of my favourites, and since you’re on tumblr there’s a good chance it’s one of yours too.

Polysyndeton is a way of creating pacing in a sentence by repeating the same conjunction as you add on more words/phrases/clauses - most commonly ‘and’, although you can also try with others (but, or, nor, so, for, yet).

Consider political speeches, where the politician may want to create catchphrases, so they need short, snappy soundbites that the media will love, and that will catch in voters’ ears:

“We have served and slaved and broken ourselves for too long on the whims of the opposition.”

Or, imagine someone asks their lovesick friend what colour their crush’s eyes are, and the lovesick fool doesn’t know:

“They’re blue, and they’re green, and brown, and red, and the colour of the sun when you stare at it too long, and they’re the night sky when the clouds cover a full moon and you wait and wait and wait and wonder when you’ll see that glimpse of the heavens again behind the clouds and behind the beauty of the moon and you can’t - you just can’t - and, oh, what does it even matter what colour her eyes are when she won’t ever look at me?”

As the "and"s flow, you can feel the pace of the sentence pick up, tumbling over itself, then when the “and”s get further apart the rest of the dialogue stretches out with the weight of this particular item on the list which, for some reason, is worth more space than the others.

Used this way, it’s really easy to show someone gushing about something, where they have a lot of emotion in what they say - perfect for fanblogs or stories about weird things that happened to you.

A lot of us have been taught that repetition is bad, especially this kind that makes a sentence go on for so long. Maybe you should just put in a full-stop and let the sentence end? I say variety is the spice of life (and literature), so play with some polysyndeton and feel where the flow takes you.

Paradigms

At this stage in your education, you’re being asked to respond to the texts you’re reading from critical perspectives of culture, identity, change, literature and more. Those are the paradigms you’re being asked to view the texts through.

(The what?)

(It’s just a fancy word that means your “way of thinking”. It’s pronounced “parra-dime”.)

The way that you think about something changes the bits and pieces you pay attention to. If I read Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw through a scientific paradigm, I’d be paying close attention to the way phonology is used through the play - how did Shaw visually represent the different accents, and what changes were made to transform Eliza’s speech? What can this play tell us about phonology in 1913? Alternatively, if I read it through a romantic paradigm, I’d focus on the interactions of the characters and how well suited they are (or aren’t) for each other. If you’ve ever read or watched something and found yourself wondering, “Will A and B end up together?” then you’ve been considering the media from a romantic paradigm.

This blog is intended to consider the NSW HSC English texts through the paradigms of their particular modules. It could simply be a way for me to gather relevant thoughts, or it could be a way for you to study your texts by picking up just another person’s analysis of them.

Best of luck to me and you.