Anastrophe

Anastrophe is the deliberate inversion of normal English word order, putting the object, complement or modifier before the subject and verb, in order to throw emphasis onto the element that has been moved.

English expects subject, then verb, then object. Anastrophe breaks that order on purpose.

• Ordinary: I have never seen a worse draft.
• Inverted: A worse draft I have never seen.

The moved element takes the stress, and the sentence acquires a formality the plain version does not have. Mark Antony opens with the device in Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar — Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears delays the verb, and The evil that men do lives after them fronts the subject of the whole speech. Yoda in Star Wars is built almost entirely out of it, which is a useful warning: overused, it stops sounding elevated and starts sounding like a costume.

It is one way to build a periodic sentence, since inverting the order usually pushes the verb or the main point towards the end.

Practical guidance. One inversion in a paragraph reads as emphasis; two read as a style; three read as a bit. It works best where the fronted element is genuinely the contested one, which is also what a cleft sentence does with less risk. And in close narration it has to match the character — an inverted sentence in the middle of a plain-spoken point of view sounds like the author leaning in.