Are Writers Afraid of Melody?

Issue 240

‎⁨Gradina Cişmigiu⁩, ⁨Bucharest⁩ 2019

---

Adding a little poetry to your prose isn’t the worst way to spend an afternoon. Unfortunately this is a time when rhythmic, melodious sentences are out of fashion. Evidence: the way in which good writing is distilled into efficient writing, a matter of deletion and omission and streamlining every phrase; the way in which writing style guides prize shorter, crisper, and simpler sentences, regardless of the situation; the way in which the typical person separates style and substance, as if it is possible to disentangle those concepts; the way in which jaws drop and shoulders lift at the notion that a sentence should have spice and vibrancy and that those elements are intrinsic to meaning. But this fetish for minimalism and technical writing is a fad, however omnipresent it might seem, and the timeworn lessons of classical sentence structures are still available for anybody who wants to learn.

Obviously you can still write fantastic and propulsive sentences without knowing any formal structures, just as you can play an instrument with flair, passion, and artfulness without ever knowing how to read music. Learning the structures is the linguistic equivalent of learning to read music—helpful, certainly, but not necessary. If your craft happens to be language, however, then I assume that you’d be eager to acquire every potential tool. At one time, learning composition did involve mastering these classical structures, and then embedding these timeless, sonorous shapes into your prose.

Which doesn’t mean that your writing can’t also have verve, a freshness, feel hip, kinetic, use vernacular: there aren’t any rules when it comes to the creation of a sentence but it is worth noticing that the classical rhetorical structures still encircle the language. Unless you study at least a little classical rhetoric, you’ll end up stirred and influenced and captivated by these structures without ever knowing why—just like someone who attends a concert and is stirred by the music without knowing anything about chords, harmonies, and instrumentation. That’s fine, but you can learn how to play. You can learn how to increase your dexterity with the language. And you can learn how to add these rhetorical structures to your arsenal of linguistic tools without losing your individual voice.