Are You suprised ?

E.g. donkeys, mules, crowing corks, goats, singing birds;

E.g. priests, beggars, children, watersellers;

E.g. villages, patios, cactus-hedges, churches, tumbling bells, sombreros, pictures;

E.g. sunsets, swimming grey-brown mountains, greening plains, olive-trees, melons.

Galsworthy found it necessary to arrange them not according to logical semantic centres, but in some other order, which would apparently suggest the rapidly changing impressions of a tourist. Enumeration of this kind assumes a stylistic function and may be regarded as a SD.

E.g. The principal production of these towns… appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dock-yard men. (Dickens Pickwick Papers)

Suspense is a compositional device which consists in arranging the matter of a communication so that the less important, descriptive, subordinate parts are amasses at the beginning, while the main idea is withheld till the end of the sentence. Thus the reader’s attention is held and his interest kept up:

E.g. Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. Was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw. (Charles Lamb)

Sentences of this type are called periodic sentences, or periods. Their function is to create suspense, to keep the reader in a state of uncertainty and expectation. This device is especially favoured by orators, apparently due to the strong influence of intonation which helps to create the desired atmosphere of expectation and emotional tension which goes with it.

Suspense always requires long stretches of speech or writing, but the main purpose is to prepare the reader for the only logical conclusion of the utterance.

E.g. If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance to their doubting too; […]

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son! (from If by Kipling)