ClearTips: Stunning sentences

Series with an extra conjunction

Adding an extra conjunction to a series (usually another and) sets each member of the list apart and suggests that all possible members have been included—A and B and C. It can also distinguish pairings in a series—A and B, C and D, and E.

It will take shape, as all civilizations take shape, by the living of it, by work and effort, by trial and error, by enterprise and adventure and experience.

The common form would have been and by enterprise, adventure, and experience. The extra and in the subseries, pulled from the front of the last part of the full series, gets rid of two commas and finishes with a melodic cascade.

He can gush and despise, revel and sneer, as through a bifocal lens.

All through the summer there had been rumors and waiting and hope against hope, as there is before wars break out.

Marketing and consumer-products firms like to know who buys what—and where and when and how.

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