Writing Tip: Listen to the Rhythm of Your Words

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. Its like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.” 

—Gary Provost

Photo credit: A Girl With Tea on Flickr

I love that quote for several reasons, the most important of which being that it teaches a valuable lesson through example. 

You see, writing isn’t just about conveying a story or message—although that’s a large part of it. It’s about conveying meaning in the purest way possible, in a manner that doesn’t distract the reader from the meaning, but enhances the experience. 

I’m not talking about purple prose—the issue with purple prose is that the language becomes so flowery and overdone that it distracts from the intended focus of the words.

Instead, I’m talking about reflecting the rhythm of rain not just through description, but through the cadence of the sentences. About making a reader’s heart pound as they race through an exciting scene with shorter paragraphs, then slowing them down with longer sentences and blocks of text during a resting period. 

Because while forgetting to do this may not change the meaning of the story, it will change the reader’s experience as they work through the pages. An exciting scene weighed down by large blocks of text may lag and feel monotonous, and a would-be breathtaking description may fall flat. 

I’m not here to tell you to start obsessing over your sentence and paragraph length, but it’s certainly something to be aware of while writing and revising. Take note of the cadence of your words—read them aloud and listen to the rhythm of the sentences. 

Make sure that your readers can hear you say, listen to this, it’s important. 

Do you pay attention to sentence or paragraph length while writing or revising?

Twitter-sized bites: 

Do sentence and paragraph length change the reader's experience of your writing? One writer says yes. (Click to tweet) 

Do you pay attention to the rhythm of your writing? Here's why you may want to. (Click to tweet)

Discussion: What's Your Favorite Word Processing Program?

Photo credit: vkotis on Flickr

I am writing this post in Pages. This is normal for me, as I transitioned from writing posts in Word to writing posts in Pages sometime last fall. At the time it was mostly out of necessity—my new computer didn’t have Word and it was less expensive to buy Pages than to buy the whole of Microsoft Office.

After I was gifted with a copy of Office, however, I’d expected that I’d go back to my Word-using days and that would be the end of it.

Except it wasn’t.

I can’t fully explain why I still use Pages to write my blog posts. I tried switching back to Word, but it felt weird—the format was different, the posts looked different and I found I was more comfortable writing my posts in Pages, as I’d become accustomed to. However, while Pages has become my blog post writing go-to software, I don’t use it for novel writing or editing.

I’ve written a post on why Scrivener is awesome in the past, so I won’t reiterate the whole thing, but basically I’ve found that Scrivener is my favorite software for first draft writing and major plot structure changes, largely because of the cork board and daily writing goal features. As I start to get into critiques and more detailed edits, however, I switch over to Word.

Maybe there’s a commenting feature in Scrivener and I just haven’t found it, but Word is a pretty universal program and I have yet to find software to beat it’s commenting system. I love that I can color code my comments by CP and perhaps the habit-forming part of me doesn’t want to let go of Word after using it for years as my novel-writing software. I still translate all of my changes back to Scrivener (copy and paste is a beautiful thing), but for final edits, at least so far, I like to use Word.

So I’m weird and I switch around between Pages, Scrivener and Word, but now I want to hear from you: what word processing programs do you use, and which is your favorite?