Writing as Music

I subscribe to Recommendo, a mailing list from Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder. I used to read Boing Boing a lot for interesting stuff; I just took a peek and it’s mostly trivia now. Admittedly, some is interesting. (The sea permanently changing color in 1907 was a new one.) Generally, it hasn’t had much for me of late.

Recommendo reminds me of the Whole Earth Catalog: intriguing tools and sites, Useful things. So I keep that one going.

And in particular, the site Text As Music was a great find.

You take a sample of your writing, paste it in, and it tells you what the statistics are, in terms of sentence lengths:

• Micro: Very short. One or two words.
• Short: Less than five, more than a couple.
• Five: Well…five.
• Medium: My best guess is that these are less than ten words.
• Long: my usual elliptical blithering with parentheticals, asides, and dependent clauses.

The idea is that your text should have a variety of sentence lengths. Tiny. A bit longer, still short. Sentences that stretch out a bit. And the indulgent, let’s-ramble-a-little, longer sentences, that tease out more of a thought.

I’ve tried a few of my blog posts from here and okay, I am not a short-sentence guy. Most of mine are mid-size or long. I will blame my eighth-grade English book for all the frowning it did at sentence fragments. Which are useful, so there.

And I am someone who likes musical prose, so seeing the long stretches of long sentences made me think, Okay., Punch it up some, huh? You do not need to Molly Bloom the hell out of every thought.

So I’m going to go ahead and write as I do, but then look back over it and see where I can make those breaths and pauses. Where I can land a thought. Be terse, where it works.

I think I learned to write in an academic setting more than anything else, and a long, well-rounded sentence that covers all the bases and properly excuses itself having the temerity to have like, an opinion, is a commonplace. So, no.

I will be having short ones. And the long ones, too, still a place for those; but this is definitely a think to think about. Much appreciated!

(And yes, there’s a “have AI improve your rhythm” prompt on that page, but I want to learn to play the drums. I don’t want a drum machine.)

Tried it for this post; it’s definitely an effort! (I do get credit for short sentences when I use semicolons. Small blessings, I guess.)