Perfect Sentences Sound Like This…
Lesson 3 of "Who's got style?" Creating Perfect Sentences with Nina Schuyler
Welcome back!
We’ve covered syntax, which is the various ways to order words in a sentence. We’ve added balance and series as techniques to create eloquence and convey certainty or authority, and reasonableness.
There is more to say about rhythm and sound and the ear. And if we’re talking about the ear, we might as well talk about the body. We are tapping into what musicians know—and what you know if you listen to music: music speaks to the body. With its alchemy and magic, it can increase the heart rate or make someone smile. It can flood the body with sadness or joy or nostalgia or immense calm. It can make you tap your foot or sing along or dance. It’s a reality that is undeniable, slipping into the body and changing it. This is profound.
Writing can do this, too, if it tends to rhythm and sound.
I read poetry. I read poetry not because I am planning on becoming a poet. I read it to inspire me to write, to stretch beyond what I thought a phrase, a sentence, a word can do. I’m filling my ears with music, rhythm and sound.
I love what Mary Karr says: Keep a commonplace book, a notebook where you write down beautiful pieces of language, things you read. Copy poems by hand, something you overheard on the street so that you’re constantly guzzling beauty so that you’re steeped in it like a fruitcake in good brandy. You’re making an alter for yourself every day.
What a powerful antidote to the day-in-and-day-out language we are drowning in: texts, emails--missives of information, reduced to the pragmatic, stripped of all the other things language can do. We can create the beauty that a human needs to guzzle.
Let’s fill our ears. Here’s Updike making music:
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