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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28992
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28992
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm going to dissent from the spin straw into gold argument that others have made. It's not that I don't see merit in it, its just that I think prose rhythm is a heard thing, by which I mean that some people hear it in what they read and some do not, and that some writers hear is in their heads as they compose and some do not.

For those who hear it, it is incomprehensible how someone could write an obviously arrhythmic sentence. Such as sentence would be as painfully and obviously wrong as one with patent grammatical flaws. The rhythmic property of the sentence forms in the mind in the first moment of creation: the sentence does not feel right in the mind and on the tongue until the rhythm is there. To a writer who works like this, there is no such thing as an arrhythmic sentence, just an unfinished sentence that is not ready to write down yet.

This being the case, though, I am not sure that there is a way for an arrhythmic writer to become a rhythmic writer. If you are hearing the rhythm as you write, you cannot help but write rhythmically. If you are not hearing it as you write, I don't think you could ever achieve the effect in revision.

This is not to say that a rhythmic writer won't improve the rhythm of their prose in revision. But I don't think they would ever think of this as an "add rhythm" step. It would simply be a case of reading a sentence and feeling it was wrong or ugly and of replacing it with something better -- and it being better mostly because it sounded better in their heads, not because they mechanically applied some axiom of rhythm to it.

Original score: 0