The Pulse of Prose: Don't Write a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing

Let rhythm boost your writing to the top

Brand Image by Pen2Profit and this story’s author

Rhythm — sometimes called pacing — is the cadence a reader feels as they go through words, sentences, and paragraphs. When we listen to music, we might clap or tap our feet, but when we read, the best writing sparks our brain to do those things figuratively.

We recognize patterns and flow — how the story moves, how our eyes flow across a written work. You may not be consciously aware of rhythm as a reader, but you’ll respond more positively and with more enjoyment if the writing has a logical flow and the writing looks comfortable on the page.

Here’s what I mean:

1. Sentences: Change up the length, and you’ll change up the rhythm. Crisp short sentences work. They speed up the pace. They make thoughts compelling or punchy. They add intensity. Well-written longer sentences help readers slow down and enjoy the reading process — perhaps even stay around longer to reflect on the ideas.

2. Punctuate: Those little marks create breathing space — essential to rhythm. It’s important to know how to use punctuation so your reader doesn’t get stopped trying to figure out why you slapped a comma in an odd place. Commas, periods, dashes, and other punctuation create breaks. Try to use them logically.

3. Effective repetition: Repeating words or phrases can give writing a beat. Look up a few of these if you want to be a superstar: anaphora (repeating words at the beginning of sentences), epistrophe (repeating words at the end of sentences), symploce (combining anaphora and epistrophe), antanaclasis (repeating a word with different meanings), chiasmus (repeating phrases in reverse order), epizeuxis (rapid repetition of a single word), and diacope (repeating a word with a word or phrase in between).

4. Make sounds work for you: Consider using alliteration, which is a string of words that all start with the same consonant. Or you can use assonance, which is the same thing with vowel sounds. Write a sentence using either of those and see how it begins to cause a reaction in your mind — like music does.

5. Paragraphs: Unskilled writers and people who live on social media tend to break every sentence out as a paragraph. Not cool. Many readers read on a mobile, so paragraphs are critical to pacing. Blocks of text over five or six lines intimidate readers. Too many paragraph breaks make readers scroll too many times. They lose interest while click, click, clicking, to follow your story.

6. Rhythm in writing affects the mood, tone, and readability of the text. It’s about controlling how your words “sound” to the reader and how smoothly they move through the narrative or argument.

Variety is the spicy cliche

When I mentor early writers, I instill in them a habit of reading their work out loud. That’s how writers begin to hear the rhythm, the cadence, the pacing — in which variety is the spice of your writing life. We learn to clearly see if the written work effectively communicates, in the right voice and style, what we intended to say.

Putting these ideas to work

If you’re serious about improving the rhythm of your writing, and therefore improving your revenue stream, let me suggest a little homework.

First task: Jonathan Edward Favreau became Barack Obama’s preferred speech writer, and we all know how engaging those speeches could be. Look up a few of the speeches he wrote for Obama and other notables. Read through and see if you can pick out the ways he used rhythm effectively.

Second: It takes skill to compose a 77-word sentence that remains clear and compelling while conjuring up a distinct rhythm. Read this one:

The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. — D.H. Lawrence Odour of Chrysanthemums (NOTE: Grammar checkers will flag missing commas in a couple of places, but Lawrence knew what he was doing and was confident in his rhythm.)

It is said that the opening clause (before the semi-colon) recalls the rhythm of a clanking train. The second part smooths out and flows more languidly as the train recedes. See if you can write a long sentence that, when read aloud, has specific rhythm and does not lose its meaning.

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Please leave a comment if this lesson resonates with you, subscribe to more secrets at Pen2Profit. Do you think such advice can improve your writing? Does it seem like too much work? Do you have a favorite way to enhance the rhythm of your writing?

This story was inspired by a question from my awesome subscriber Hypegirl Healing. She asked how to get jumbled thoughts and ideas to clearly communicate on the page.