To Level Up Your Writing, Listen to the Music of Your Words

Why the sound of your language and rhythm of your sentence matters

The great Modernist editor Ezra Pound infamously divided poetry into melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia — or writing dominated by its sounds, by its images, or by its definitions. He then divvied up many of the major poets into which category their work showed strengths or weaknesses.

It is melopoeis — words and sentences as music — that carries most of the emotional weight, Pound argued. Unfortunately, writing-as-music has become all too rare — even in poetry. If and when writers actually read their work out loud, it’s usually to listen for mistakes rather than to hear the pitter-patter of their sentence or the swish and swoosh of its sounds.

Thinking of writing as music is like going to a concert in a concert hall that has been built for acoustics rather than listening to it in your headphones. It enriches, it amplifies. It can become a siren song to lure or an ambush to entrap.

We all know a little bit about the allure of alliteration, and maybe you’re even a master of iambic pentameter, the Bard’s go-to meter that supposedly captures the cadence of speech. But here are some other things you can think about to amp up the melody in your masterpieces.

A Simple Case Study

Read these words out loud:

• trash
• junk
• filth
• garbage
• refuse
• waste
• detritus

How do they feel in your mouth? Do they snap? Unspool? Swish? What is the dominant letter/sound? Do they “feel” dirty or sanitized?

These words all mean ostensibly the same thing. If you were creating a metaphor, you could substitute them to equal effect. But how they resonate and reverberate in a sentence, though? That will have widely different implications. They tell you about the class and education of the speaker. They tell you about context. They tell you how to feel.

This is just one word. Most words in a sentence are relatively “neutral” or carry less emotional and sensory weight. But how you decide to nestle words together or bounce them back-to-back will tell a reader which ones matter. It can slow down the speed at which they read; it can invite them to sip and to savor. It can speed them up and hurl them to the end.

Consider:

• He tossed out the trash.
• He carried the garbage down to the curb.
• He delicately eliminated the detritus from his domicile.

Do these sentences mean the same thing? More or less. Do they create the same impact? Not even remotely.

Here are a few basic principles to get us started:

• Generally speaking, short (i.e. monosyllabic) words create a punchier and faster pace.
• Longer (i.e. polysyllabic) words, especially in strings, slow reading down.
• Nasals like M & N hum
• Fricatives like F, V, S, Z hiss
• Plosives like B, P, T, D explode

When syllables or sounds are balanced within a sentence, they don’t “do” much. But when you start to emphasize and draw attention to a particular “family,” it gives a definite texture to your writing. Your readers may not consciously pick up on this, but it still works as an undercurrent to pull them in the direction you want them to feel.

The Power of Repetition

Repetition gets a bad rap. It’s often made to sound boring, careless, or lazy. But well-timed, well implement repetition is like a chord in a song: it ties the disparate thoughts together, it creates a home base and a theme. Well-executed, repetition becomes a bass drum that sets the pace and allows for elaborations and variations to shine.

When it was used to create a sense of “vehemence or fullness,” as I did in the paragraph above, the rhetoricians called this palilogia. I could have dug through the thesaurus to come up with different terms in each sentence, but that often can break the cohesion of a paragraph and the rhythm of cumulative meaning.

One of my favorites form of repetition is synonymia, or “amplification by synonym.” This is a great way to get readers to slow down, to mull over an image, or to relish a charming turn of phrase. Overused or ignorantly done, it can become redundant — as in the all-too-common phrase “global pandemic” — but when smartly implemented, it lets a reader know this is important.

You can pile, heap, and stack these synonyms up in a simple string of nouns or adjectives or verbs. I particularly appreciate artfully place appositions. Two words or phrases are “in apposition” when they are grammatically parallel and share a referent. Most commonly, these are nouns or noun phrases. Example:

• My oldest sister, Marie, is a lawyer.

In this simple sentence, Marie is the referent. A quick way to tell if your words are in apposition is you can easily interchange them. It would be equally true to say:

• Marie is my oldest sister.
• My oldest sister is a lawyer.
• Marie, a lawyer, is my oldest sister.

When a sentence gets longer but you want to condense a lot of meaning into it, dropping words into appositional slots can come in handy with sound and rhythm. Consider:

• My oldest sister, my enemy, my dearest friend, Marie is a lawyer of extraordinary talent, of wisdom, of fresh insight — a veritable wizard of the law.

So this is obviously overstating it — a bit — but by putting all these elements of Marie into a few simple slots, it creates a symphony out of her personality that doesn’t elevate any one aspect of herself above another. It shows that Marie is multiple and layered. The phrases become brushstrokes to paint a complex picture.

The Gritty Part: Playing with Conjunctions

Climax is not just the peak point of a story (or a sexual encounter). Climax is a building swoop of words, words that mount and swell out into the mind, out into the reader's expectations. They pile up and the reader starts to realize that something is coming, something big or something new, and as the parallel phrases start to accumulate, the more the reader starts to anticipate, to expect, to hold their breath for the coming kaboom — that peak of discovery or surprise.

You can build towards a climax using apposition, as discussed above. But what about this?

• He was downtrodden, despised, displaced. With fervor, with agony, with despair, he cursed his accusers and fled.

Or:

• He was downtrodden; he was despised; he was displaced.

The rhetoricians call this asyndeton, wherein you pile up parallel words, phrases, or clauses without the use of a conjunction such as “and,” “or,” “but.” It changes the cadence of your writing, though fair warning: not every editor is into it.

It’s important to make sure that these words or phrases are parallel, however, which is often the part that novice writers miss. If you try to drop a noun in the spot where an adjective is expected, or a different form of the verb, it sounds off and gets confusing.

For the opposite effect, try out polysyndeton and drop a conjunction between each word or clause:

• He was downtrodden and despised and displaced.
• He was downtrodden, and he was despised, and he was displaced.

The same words with or without conjunctions create a very different effect. If you’re still not sure what the difference might make, here is a “normal” sentence for comparison:

• He was downtrodden, despised, and displaced. With fervor, agony, and despair, he cursed his accusers and fled.

Notice how the pace of reading changes? Notice how you engage with the normally formatted “list” on a mostly intellectual level, whereas asyndeton feels more sharp and direct, a series of jabs. Poke, poke, poke.

On the other hand, when the conjunctions multiply, it feels overwhelming. Unrelenting. An avalanche of words that threatens and looms and staggers as it grows.

Try them out. See how they feel. Know that they are options — for the savvy writer — but you might have to fight for your right to use them.

A Few More Classics For the Road

Ok, let’s step back from the grammatical edge now and consider a few simpler but underutilized ways to max out your melody.

Onomatopoeia is a sound recreated through the word used to express it. Baaaa is the sound a sheep makes; drip drip drip goes the coffeemaker; a table saw or a bumblebee might buzz. Don’t underestimate their power, especially if you innovate — they can give a surprising depth, a feeling of reality, to a moment.

Epithets such as rosy-fingered Dawn or grey-eyed Athena are often considered the purview of Homer, but gangsters and rappers know their power. These days, we often simply call them nicknames, but an epithet is also a shortcut to meaning that can turn a name into a piece of poetry.

• Al “Scarface” Capone
• Ice Pick Willie
• Big Daddy Kane
• Swift-footed Achilles

Like so many of the tips I’ve suggested, Anastrophe should not be overused. It’s an inverted or unusual arrangement of words within a sentence “for metrical convenience or poetic effect.” Example:

• Rare it is to find a woman of such beauty.

By popping “rare” at the start of the sentence, I can make sure you will notice it. This can then be combined with repetition for an even stronger effect:

• Rare it is to find a woman of such beauty; rarer than a cloudy day in Arizona, rarer than a snowflake in Mexico.

Endless are the ways to ensnare your audience, to ensure you catch them on the hook of your words. You can sagaciously sprinkle sounds; you can swoop and soar and sing your sentences, far fairer than a siren.

Or you can let them plod, plop, plunge into your readers’ minds — a waterfall of words, whispered words, whooping words, words full of meaning and ripe with wisdom. You can pile up words, phrases, clauses; you can snip snip all that doesn’t serve and say it simply.

But whatever you chose, dear writer, listen to your words, hear what they say without the pretty pictures or the dictionary definitions. Become a melopoet, if you dare, and make a little music.

All terms are taken from Richard A. Lanham’s A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed.