We’ve got rhythm by Bill Kirton
When asked for advice about writing, one of the things I stress is that writers should read their work aloud. It reveals mistakes, repetitions, places where punctuation’s absent and should be present and vice versa, as well as things which just ‘don’t feel right’. It also makes you realise that your sentences are maybe all around the same length, so there’s a monotony about your delivery. Those are all obvious benefits but reading aloud also brings home the importance of rhythm. It’s an obvious element in poetry but it’s just as important in stories, novels or any other form of prose writing. As timing is to the sportsman or comedian, so rhythm is to the writer. In more formal types of poetry, there are usually rules about where stresses should fall, Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ is a typical iambic pentameter. Switch the stress to the second syllable and the iamb becomes a trochee, as in Longfellow’s: ‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the s...