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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24083
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24083
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think there are good arguments to be made that rhythm and clarity are closely connected. We tend to have a very puritanical view of prose preached to us today. It is all spare and bleached and square corners. It is dessicated language. It does nothing to engage the ear or the eye or the senses. It may be statically clear, but I am not convinced that it is transitively clear, that it actually makes its way into the mind in a memorable way.

It is certainly clear that we do recall the elegant phrase. And a truly elegant phrase is made up of many things, it is the perfect image, but it is also the perfect rhythm of language. Clarity, of the highest kind, is not a dessicated whitewashed thing, but a thing of beauty and richness.

How do you do it? I think it is largely a matter of training the ear. You have to listen for the rhythm of language (which is a much more subtle thing than the rhythm of poetry). You have to weight the sentence and even the paragraph or the passage as a whole. You have to consider the imagery and the words that paint those images and how the choice and arrangement of those words reinforces those images and leads the reader to them with elegance.

In short, it is not about finding individual words with the right beat pattern to drop into a sentence. It is about working all the component of writing at a larger scale, and working and reworking them until all the parts come together. You have to train you brain to compose in this way. A large part of that has to be reading writes who do it exceptionally well. Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, and Jane Austen are the names that come most readily to mind.

Original score: 2