WRITING IN RHYTHM

THE MUSIC OF LANGUAGE

Often when people talk about “the music of language” they make it sound like a mere frill, something we add to “dress up” plain writing. I don’t agree with this view. At the heart of language, I hear music—word-music, akin in many ways to instrumental music or song. I agree with the poet Robert Pinsky, who has said about ordinary speech, “It is almost as if we sing to one other all day.”

How, then, are music and language similar? You can think of it this way: Spoken language, like music, is a stream of sound. Writing, like speech, can make use of the musical characteristics of that stream of sound. In this world of verbal music, there’s much to explore. English, like every language, is made up of certain sounds; these sounds have certain qualities and can be arranged according to musical principles.

We can’t cover all of the techniques of making music with language, so here we’ll confine our explorations to the rhythm of sentences. Rhythm in writing, just like rhythm in music, comes to us through our ears. So, if you are interested in sentence rhythm, I encourage you to get into two important habits: one, slow down as you read and write; and two, listen to words with your writer’s ear.

The Rhythm of Sentences: Rhythm Patterns

When we speak or write, we say, not . Poets working in traditional forms find ways to organize the stressed and unstressed syllables of English into regular patterns. Prose writers don’t tend to work this way: Instead of organizing syllables, we use syntactic elements (words, phrases, clauses, sentences) to create rhythm patterns that extend, like musical patterns, in . To create these patterns we make use of a technique that is fundamental to musical composition: repetition and variation.