The Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us that:
“A cadence is a rhythm, or a flow of words or music, in a
sequence that is regular (or steady as it were). But lest we be mistaken,
cadence also lends its meaning to the sounds of Mother Nature (such as
birdsong) to be sure. Cadence comes from the Middle English borrowed
from Medieval Latin’s own cadentia, a lovely word that means ‘rhythm in
verse.’ “
There is an excellent discussion of it in the 2017 book by Sam
Leith titled Write to the Point – A master class on the fundamentals of writing
for any purpose. Beginning on page 151 he says:
“Even silent reading, both neuroscience and experience tell
us, is an auditory experience. When we talk about cadence in prose we’re
talking about the equivalent of meter in poetry; the sounds of the words. When
we say something is ‘well written,’ a very large part of that will be to do
with how it sounds. Cadence is prose rhythm. And it’s a hugely important aspect
of writing, but it’s also one of the hardest ones to discuss in a formal way.
Prose doesn’t scan in the metronomic way that traditional
verse does. The basic iambic beat of English verse is de dum de dum de dum
de dum de dum and if you write like that in prose it would sound
ridiculous. But prose does have its pauses and its rushes and its arpeggios. Punctuation,
as I discussed in my chapters on the subject earlier, has its origin as a means
of marking pauses in reading out loud – and that remains part of what it does.
So where you put the commas, where you break sentences,
whether you use polysyllables or short words … all will have an effect on the
ease and fluency of reading. A good writer doesn’t just have a brain; he or she
has an ear. The more you read and the more you write, the better that ear will
get. A good sentence will come to feel right.
But – as cannot be said too often – that ear needs training.
Experienced composers can read music and ‘hear’ the sounds in their heads.
Experienced writers, likewise. But many, many very experienced writers still
use a simple technique for, as it were, double-checking. They read what they
have written out loud. If you have time to do so once you’ve completed a draft,
you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
An awkward separation of subject and verb, for instance,
becomes particularly stark when read aloud: you’ll find your voice holding off
as your brain waits for the second shoe to drop. You may even find – if there
are enough subordinate clauses getting in the way of the main event; if, as in
this sentence, there’s a great long digression separating the word ‘find’ from
the question of what it is that you’re eventually going to find – that you run
out of breath trying to get through the wretched thing.
Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, has
said: ‘Once you’ve finished a first draft of your speech … stand up and read it
aloud. Where you falter, alter.’ That applies especially to speeches of course:
In that case you’re trying to produce something that’s hard to stumble over
when spoken aloud. Tongue twisters such as ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’ are easier
on the page than in the mouth. But its also good advice to the prose writer. There
is a developmental connection between reading aloud and reading silently – and a
neurological one, too.”
The image was adapted from one at Openclipart.
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