enjambment

This term is primarily used in literary criticism and poetic analysis to describe a specific structural technique. It creates a tension between the visual break of the line and the grammatical flow of the sentence, often used to mimic natural speech or to accelerate the pace of a poem.

In academic writing, it is frequently contrasted with "end-stopping," where a line concludes with a punctuation mark. While "enjambment" is a technical term, it is used across various registers of literary discussion, from introductory poetry courses to advanced scholarly monographs.