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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29612
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29612
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The word lyrical does not mean "like a song lyric". If anything the derivation probably goes the other way. Lyrical means expressing the writer's emotions in a beautiful or imaginative way. Thus you can have poetry that is lyrical and poetry that is not lyrical. You can have prose that is lyrical but not rhythmic, and prose that is rhythmic but not lyrical. (I have been arguing with my editor recently about sentence rhythm in my forthcoming technical book. The prose in that book is a rhythmic as I can reasonably make it, but no part of it is in any way lyrical.)

Of course, in expressing your emotions in beautiful and imaginative language you may very well use metaphors, make references to nature, and use rhythm. Then again you could do all of these things in a biology textbook that was not lyrical at all.

Finally, alternating short and long sentences is not rhythm. Rhythm has to do with where stresses fall in a sentence. Prose rhythm, at least as I think of it, has to do with how the natural stresses in a sentence support the meaning of that sentence. Thus:

> We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender

Original score: 1