Anadiplosis leads to flow. Flow leads to reader immersion. Reader immersion leads to a more enjoyable read.

Anadiplosis is the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of one sentence or clause at—or near—the beginning of the following sentence or clause.

Just as we saw with the official definition of anaphora, anadiplosis can work not just between sentences but also between clauses.

As you can see in the title and subtitle, I have three clear examples of anadiplosis. The first is a clean, single-word anadiplosis: ‘flow’ -> period -> ‘Flow...’. The second is a “phrase” anadiplosis example: ‘reader immersion’ → period → ‘Reader immersion...’. Finally, the third uses anadiplosis as an anadiplosis (mind blown, right?!): ‘anadiplosis’ -> period -> ‘Anadiplosis...’

So indeed, all three are examples of anadiplosis. Anadiplosis that works. (See what I just did there?) Okay, enough anadiplosis.

Of course, if you look up the definition of anadiplosis in any Wikipedia article, dictionary or what have you, you are likely to arrive at the famous example from George Lucas, from Yoda’s dialogue in The Phantom Menace:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

Simple. But powerful and effective.

Using Anadiplosis-like Prose to Achieve Consecution

If we think about anadiplosis more liberally—taking the concept, but not quite its strict rhetorical requirements—we can start writing prose that has consecution:

He looked hard at the old book, with its tattered leather binding, which he could buy from this old man. This old, bearded man reminded him so much of his grandfather. And his grandfather... what would he think of him purchasing this book? And his parents, too, would they approve of him spending their money to buy the book? But the book itself... this book he needed.

That was just a quick off-the-cuff example, where I’ve written every sentence with some sort of anchor or tie to some item of the previous sentence, in most cases approaching something close to anadiplosis:

old book / old man (double ‘old’ lexical/semantic link) → old man

his grandfather → grandfather

purchasing / family (double lexical/semantic link) → his parents

the book → this book he needed

(I know, this is the internet, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it truly took me less than 3 minutes to write that paragraph. I’d anyway argue that’s fairly clear, based on how ‘flat’ the prose is.)

Regardless, you can see the resulting effect of the prose itself: a sort of dreamlike, satisfying stream-of-consciousness type of flow that works beautifully as free indirect discourse. Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of better examples of consecution with better sentence structure and organization than this one, but as always with English, the sky is the limit when it comes to line-level polish.

But I overreach; these things are to be discussed more in detail in a separate consecution post for another time...