Just see what happens when you consciously try to make one chunk of text feel rhythmically different from the one right before it. Even if you have no intention of ever rallying a crowd or running for office, their work can help inspire your own. 'A government of the people, that the people created, for the people' doesn't. "Inattentive writers muck up lists badly, throwing imbalanced cadences together and leaving their sentences scrambling. Broadway, 1999), "Meter is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance. In “How To Read, Edit, and Evaluate Your Writing With Fresh Eyes,” I recommended listening to your writing read aloud, whether by you or a trusted friend, as a way to “see” it with fresh perspective. Similarly, if I create a sentence or paragraph that falls into rhythmic patterns of three (syllables, blunt words, or nearly anything else), I’ll follow it with something more aligned with a duple meter. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. While there may be no direct correlation between a John Coltrane solo and how you write the next chapter of your book, listening to great jazz can help charge your creative batteries, particularly when it comes to bringing a musical perspective to your work, and could lead you to new rhythmic experiments with your words. You have entered an incorrect email address! Whether telling their stories in rapid-fire triplets or with stuttered phrases punctuated by loaded silences, the best rappers know how to choose and place their words to make their narratives fly, adding unexpected layers of nuance and power in the process. "In music, the rhythm is usually produced by making certain notes in a sequence stand out from others by being louder or longer or higher...In speech, we find that syllables take the place of musical notes or beats, and in many languages the stressed syllables determine the rhythm..."What does seem to be clear is that rhythm is useful to us in communicating: it helps us to find our way through the confusing stream of continuous speech, enabling us to divide speech into words or other units, to signal changes between topic or speaker, and to spot which items in the message are the most important. English uses stressed syllables produced at roughly regular intervals of time (in fluent speech) and separated by unstressed syllables—a stress-timed rhythm which we can tap out in a 'tum-te-tum' way, as in a traditional line of poetry: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing...one has to recapture this and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit in.

The emails are entertaining, and many, like the ones on etymology, are educational. Rhythm in writing acts as beat does in music. As a writer, it can be easy to get wonderfully lost crafting images, foreshadowing major plot twists, building motifs, and sculpting seamless wordplay. Unless I’m working on something routine or mundane, I never feel like I’m doing my best writing when distracted by music. "(Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. When working, turn off the music and focus on the rhythms inherent in your sentences and paragraphs instead. Here are a few ideas to help infuse your own writing with rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. Overlook, 2005), ​"Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. ​"The writer is not advised to try consciously for special rhythmic effects.


"(David Crystal, How Language Works.