In this section we will be dealing with issues that go beyond logic and grammar and call into play our feeling for words, our aesthetic sense, and our sense of emotional logic, for they too have a part to play in assessing how words can best be organized to convey meaning.Prose RhythmThe rhythm of prose is somewhat different from the rhythm of poetry. The regular ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum beat of iambic pentameter—or the beat of any other kind of poetic meter—is generally out of place in prose:I saw at once how it would be, that nothing else would ever have the wonder of that first caress. Going homeward from the drug store, I met up with Bob Kowalski, who was walking his pet poodle. If you find yourself writing sentences like these, either go ahead and cut them up into verse lines or change them!I realized it at once: Nothing else would have the wonder of that first caress. The sentiment may be no less corny in this version, but this sentence is genuine prose and has a genuine prose rhythm. Rhythmically everything hinges here on the dramatic pause produced by the colon. It suggests the heart-stopping moment of awareness, when you realize that something important has happened but are as yet unable to put into words what it is or why it is important. The second part of the sentence gives us the verbalization of that insight, the rush or patter of words as they come into the speaker's mind. That is the emotional situation that the writer intends to convey. The rhythm of the sentence helps to convey the situation; indeed, we might almost say that the rhythm of this particular sentence "enacts" what is taking place.This idea is quite familiar in poetry. Here is Alexander Pope discussing and illustrating the idea in his Essay on Criticism, written at the beginning of the 18th century:When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors and the words move slow;
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main. This is something in which prose can emulate poetry, though in different rhythms:Stooping, Bartholomew felt for a hold under the chassis, then suddenly jerked the front end of the vehicle high up off the ground. She was off in an instant, flying down the corridor with her little legs twinkling under her skirt. Slowly at first, one step taken with infinite caution, then a second step, then a third—she was gaining in confidence now—a fourth, a fifth, and she knew she was free and broke into a run. The rhythmic effect is produced, first, by choosing words on the basis of their sound and stress pattern, as well as their meaning. You would not, for instance, include words such as lugubrious, onerous, or ponderous in a sentence where you wanted to give the impression of speed and lightness, any more than you would put quick, bright, shimmer, or scintillate into a sentence that was intended to convey heaviness or dismalness. And that choice of words is complemented by what we might call the general distribution of pace, weight, and energy throughout the sentence. To illustrate what this last phrase means, let us look again at an example used earlier:I realized it at once: Nothing else would have the wonder of that first caress. There is a slight buildup of energy before the colon and a release of it after the colon. The first part of the sentence is relatively weightier and slower; the second, lighter and quicker.All the examples used so far in this section illustrate, to a greater or lesser extent, what we might call rhythmic special effects. There is limited scope for the writer to use rhythm to "enact" something other than when he or she is describing an action of some kind, and even then the scope is somewhat limited. A student once enthused about a particular sentence in James Joyce's Ulysses: "It's written in the rhythm of the peristaltic action of his bowels!" But that is a feat that few of us, probably, would feel inclined to emulate.Where to Find RhythmWhere else, then, does rhythm play a part? There are rhythms in everyday speech that we cannot exactly reproduce on paper but that we can try at least to remind the reader of, where appropriate:Never, ever, ever do that again! You angel, you absolute angel! I'm coming, I'm coming, wait for me! There are rhythms in rhetoric, which more often than not rely on repetition:Do we want freedom? Yes! Do we want unlimited freedom? No! "A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have." Notice how the second half of Theodore Roosevelt's last sentence exactly balances the first half not only in sense but also in rhythm.There are rhythms, too, in wit and comedy, and a writer should in particular pay attention to these:"To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times." "Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building." The first quotation is attributed to Mark Twain; the second comes from Oscar Wilde's play A Woman of No Importance. We know from the testimony of many great comedians that timing is of the essence in comedy. The joke falls flat if you do not deliver the punch line at the right moment and in the right way. This is true of written comedy as well. The sting in an epigram, the kernel of the joke, comes at the end. Rhythm has to be imparted to the sentence in such a way that the energy flows through it toward the end and emerges there with greatest impact.Rhythm and PositioningWhether you intend to write in a comic style, there is a lesson to be learned here. The position of a word, phrase, clause, or idea within the overall layout of a sentence is very important, as has been said before, because positioning plays a major part in establishing the relationship between the various elements and thus conveys meaning. Above and beyond this, however, there are certain positions within a sentence that give a word or group of words greater impact. The position of greatest prominence is usually the end. The reason is partly the direction of the usual rhythmic flow, partly the fact that the end of one sentence is, generally speaking, the springing-off point for the next sentence. The word or words just preceding the period are naturally well placed to lead into the continuing narrative. The position of next greatest prominence is, as you would expect, the beginning. The first word, or the first significant word, in a sentence is generally stressed in speech. Something of that stressed quality carries over into writing.These are statements of fact that the writer should bear in mind, rather than hard-and-fast rules that should govern all of his or her thinking on sentence construction. They are quite important facts, nonetheless.Rhythm and Sentence ConstructionIt is now time to try to apply some of what has just been said about rhythm in sentences and positions of prominence to more ordinary material, and also to link this aspect of sentence-making to aspects discussed earlier. For this purpose, we shall use examples from an earlier subsection discussing the basic principles of coordination and subordination. There, various sentences were shown in subordinated and coordinated form, and it was remarked that the difference between the two forms was slight but significant. The subsequent discussions will enable to see more clearly what that significance is.Two of the sentences in question were these:Margaret had forgotten, but Carlos most certainly had not. andAlthough Margaret had forgotten, Carlos most certainly had not. The first is the coordinated version. As befits a sentence in which two clauses of equal value are joined, the first version is the more equally balanced of the two. The word Margaret is the first word in the sentence. It thus has considerable prominence and is stressed. The next word that would naturally be stressed is Carlos. This puts the two "actors" in the sentence on an equal footing. You feel, as a result, that the next sentence could say something more about Margaret, something more about Carlos, or continue to compare or contrast their reactions:Margaret had forgotten, but Carlos most certainly had not. She was sufficiently wealthy to be fairly unconcerned about the small sums that people owed her…. Margaret had forgotten, but Carlos most certainly had not. He was not one to forgive small debts or small slights…. Margaret had forgotten, but Carlos most certainly had not. She was much more inclined to forgive small slights than was her prickly brother…. Any one of those three continuations seems acceptable.But this is not the case when the second version is used. The first word in that sentence, the stressed word, is Although. The emphasis is on the subordinating conjunction, and Margaret is deemphasized, whereas Carlos is in the same position as before. The effect of this is to place the focus on Carlos and his reaction to the extent that you would feel it was almost inappropriate to continue talking about Margaret. For example, if you add the following continuation,Although Margaret had forgotten, Carlos most certainly had not. She was sufficiently wealthy … the feminine personal pronoun startles the reader. She? But we were talking about Carlos! A continuation that said more about Carlos's attitude would follow much more naturally:Although Margaret had forgotten, Carlos most certainly had not. He was not one to forgive small debts or small slights…. Changing the structure of the sentence has changed the stress pattern and the rhythm and consequently shifted its focus. By putting the words that refer to Margaret into a subordinate clause, we have implicitly suggested that she is less important than Carlos at this particular point in the narrative, and the rhythm of the sentence bears this out. The expectation is thus raised that Carlos will be the subject when the narrative continues. The weight carried by a main clause has been referred to before; this example further illustrates the point.But let us suppose that Margaret is the main character. How should we alter the sentence to shift the focus firmly onto her? Following from what was said in the previous paragraph, the obvious solution would seem to be to allow Margaret to figure in the main clause and to subordinate Carlos:Margaret had forgotten, although Carlos most certainly had not. She was sufficiently wealthy … orAlthough Carlos had most certainly not forgotten, Margaret had. She was sufficiently wealthy … Of these two versions, the first is probably the more satisfactory, but it only really takes us back to where we were when we used the coordinated sentence as our base. Margaret is stressed, but because it falls in the middle of the sentence and not at the beginning, although is not stressed, so Carlos continues to be the second emphasized word. The second version seems unbalanced, rhythmically or proportionally. The last two words seem out of proportion to the first seven, despite the fact that the end is usually the position of prominence and that the word Margaret is stressed. This is because in the subordinate clause the initial stress has shifted away from Although and onto Carlos. It must, in a natural reading of the sentence, to cope with the emphatic negative—most certainly not—that follows.Because they demand to receive some measure of stress, these emphatic words largely counteract the effect of putting Carlos into a subordinate clause. We have to think again to find a method of putting the spotlight on Margaret. Two solutions suggest themselves.The first solution is simply to transfer the emphatic words to Margaret's clause:Although Carlos had not forgotten, Margaret most certainly had. She was sufficiently wealthy to be fairly unconcerned about the small sums that people owed her…. Again, however, the result is far from perfect. It is not that the words most certainly belong by nature with a negative. It is easy enough to think of sentences in which they reinforce a positive statement—I most certainly do; there is most certainly a case to answer. It is rather that with this particular continuation, in which Margaret is said to be "fairly unconcerned" about small debts, seems to go against the grain to emphasize Margaret's nonchalance. It runs counter to what we might call the emotional logic of what is being said. It is more logical to link emphasizing words or phrases with the stronger emotion, where two states of feeling are being compared:Although Carlos did not bear a grudge, Margaret most certainly did. If Carlos was relatively calm about the whole affair, Margaret most certainly was not. The effect would be actually comic if we said:Carlos was screaming his head off, but Margaret most certainly was not. The alternative solution, since transferring the emphatic phrase will not do the trick, is, somewhat paradoxically, to say more about Carlos:Although Carlos was of an unforgiving nature and most certainly had not forgotten, Margaret had. orAlthough Carlos most certainly had not forgotten, because he never forgave the slightest offense or failed to collect the smallest debt, Margaret had. What we have done here is to break up the emphatic rhythm of the shorter subordinate clause by adding extra syllables. As a result, the two final words appear as a succinct, even pithy riposte to the more elaborate statement of Carlos's attitude, and Margaret gets her position of prominence.Summing UpRhythm can be a significant factor even in fairly everyday sentences and thus earns its place alongside logic. To hear rhythm we must listen carefully to the way our prose sounds to the ear or "the mind's voice." That is a discipline every writer must become used to, not simply for the relatively short span of a sentence, but over the course of longer units such as paragraphs.
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