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Like music, writing has rhythm. Think of Shakespeare. He wrote his plays in iambic pentameter: Da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum.
Okay, I know you’re not Shakespeare but you and your sales letter have rhythm too, whether you know it or not. The beat that exists behind your writing is a key part of what we call your writing voice. It makes your work unique and recognizable. It expresses your personality. It’s part of what makes you, you.
Some lucky people are born with an ear for good rhythm. Just as “born musicians” know when to slow down and when to speed up, “born writers” instinctively understand how to play with the rhythm of their words. Others need to learn. Here are five strategies to help you do better:
Vary your sentence length
When I teach writing workshops, I urge people to aim for an average sentence length of about fourteen words. According to studies by the American Press Institute, this is the best length for readability in today’s society. People sometimes roll their eyes at me, suggesting that I’m a proponent for dumbing-down the language.
This, I am convinced, is a misunderstanding. I am not suggesting you write only fourteen-word sentences. that, after all, would be boring. Instead, I’m urging you to aim for an average of fourteen words. There’s a key difference. Some sentences should be long — anywhere from twenty-five to forty words. Others should be short. Two or three words.
It’s the variety that matters, because this is what gives your writing rhythm. If you were to put your sentence length onto an Excel spreadsheet and then turn it into a bar graph (try this sometime!) you should see a highly uneven graph — one with lots of peaks and valleys.
Vary your word length
Just as your sentences shouldn’t all be the same length, so, too, your words should show variety. I’m all for short and basic Anglo-Saxon words: hills, fight, beaches, island. (Short, punchy words were Winston Churchill’s secret.)
But to make your writing flow, you also want to throw in the occasional three or four syllable word like, say, “occasional.” Again, it is the juxtaposition (hey, there’s a five-syllable one) of long and short that lends your writing its rhythm.
Read your work aloud
Musicians don’t practice in silence, nor should you. You will not truly understand the rhythm of your writing until you read it out loud. Do it quietly, if you wish. I won’t even complain if you whisper. Read it again and again to tweak your sentence length and adjust your word choice until the language flows and sounds musical to you.
Study the rhythms of other writers
Just as most teenagers think that pop/rock is the best kind of music because that’s all they hear, many adults think that marketing mumbo-jumbo or happy PR prattle is normal, because that’s the only type of reading they do. Please, don’t limit your reading to brochures, websites and your daily newspaper or you’ll risk developing a tin ear!
If you want to improve your rhythm, read widely and catholically. The science writer Lewis Thomas (LIVES OF A CELL) has a wonderful sense of rhythm. So do Malcolm Gladwell (THE TIPPING POINT) and Tom Wolfe (BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES), although they are very different. Study a wide range of writers and decide what you like. Many magazines also offer a terrific selection of writing that is strong in rhythm — Scientific American, Sports Illustrated, and the New Yorker, among them.
And, for bonus points, try a bit of poetry. (My all time favorite poet for rhythm is Dylan Thomas.)
Copy the work of writers you admire
When I say “copy,” I don’t mean “imitate” (although that’s a good idea too). I mean copy, literally, by typing passages from other writers into your computer or by handwriting the work onto paper. I know this sounds crazy but rhythm is something you feel rather than think. By copying the work of others, you will absorb their sense of rhythm. Did you know that this was how Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write?
This is not an intellectual exercise because, above all, rhythm comes from the heart.
Next week: Formality vs. Informality and Humor vs. Sincerity
This is the second of a multi-part series from writing coach Daphne Gray-Grant. If you found this post this useful, go sign up for Daphne’s newsletter. You won’t regret it.
© 2008 by Daphne Gray-Grant
Tags: Daphne Gray-Grant, Power Writing, voice
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
I just stopped by from Lisa’s blog. Great stuff, this. I especially liked your Red Dragon vs. Manhunter posts. I write thrillers as well, and I plan to stop by more often.
Cheers,
Josephine
Josephine… thank you. I’ve seen you over at Lisa’s joint, too. It’s great meeting you.
I’m of the Robert Frost school of writing, where he says, “I don’t do writing exercises. Things that don’t work out, I call those exercises.”
Writing workshops and classes have a tendency to waste aspiring writer’s time in a big way. Everything you do should move toward a finished product. If you write a scene, you should expect to use it somewhere eventually.
This advice about “copying” other writers is not new. I’ve heard it enough times to not know who the first idiot was who started this ball rolling.
If you want to learn from a writer, then do the work and study his/her work. Don’t imitate it, the world has enough hacks. Study it. Understand it. Now if you want to be a better typist or work on your penmanship, then by all means, copy away.
“Some lucky people are born with…” Nope. Not at all. The reality is that some people are too lazy to develop skill and talent and must justify this by saying that people who do invest time in themselves must have been “born” with it.
What she is describing with Shakespeare is rhythm. Rhythm is one form of repetition, which is one of the premises of any art form. The advice about varying your word and sentence length is pretty arbitrary. Don’t listen to here. It is the context that demands the technique, not the other way around. I’ll do a post on repetition in art at some point.
I do strongly agree with the point about reading your work aloud. But again context plays a strong role. Some works aren’t for the ear but the eye.