The Periodic Sentence

• Copy into terms: Periodic Sentence: 
  A sentence (frequently long and involved) marked by suspended syntax in which the sense is not completed until the final clause (or very near there)--usually with an emphatic climax. Contrast with loose sentence.

 Advice:

"The proper place in the sentence for the word or group of words that the writer desires to make most prominent is usually the end."
(William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style) 

Explanation:

• Periodic Sentences in Classical Rhetoric

"Isocrates' style is particularly characterized by the use of the periodic sentence, a style still recommended today as a means to achieve emphasis. Periodic sentences are formed by a series of clauses that build to the main clause leading to a climactic effect. Here is an example of the periodic sentence from Isocrates' political treatise, Panegyricus:

For when that greatest of all wars broke out and a multitude of dangers presented themselves at one and the same time, when our enemies regarded themselves as irresistible because of their numbers and our allies thought themselves endowed with a courage which could not be excelled, we outdid them both in a way appropriate to each."

(James J. Murphy and Richard A. Katula, A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric, 3rd ed. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003)




More Examples (copy one into notes):

• "And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing."
  (The King James Bible, I Corinthians 13)

• 
  "Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist."
  (Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," 1765)

• 
  “Addison’s style, like a light wine, pleases everybody from the first. Johnson’s [style], like a liquor of more body, seems too strong at first, but, by degrees, is highly relished; and such is the melody of his periods, so much do they captivate the ear, and seize upon the attention, that there is scarcely any writer, however inconsiderable, who does not aim, in some degree, at the same species of excellence.”
  (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791) 

• "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius, " or, as likely, emotive, babbling insanity, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

• "In the almost incredibly brief time which it took the small but sturdy porter to roll a milk-can across the platform and bump it, with a clang, against other milk-cans similarly treated a moment before, Ashe fell in love."
  (P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh, 1915) 

• "Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed."
  (Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales, 1955)