Aural Rhyming

While how your writing looks is important to how it rhymes, how it sounds is really where great writers distinguish themselves.

Your writing is always read out loud by the reader–sometimes audibly, sometimes quietly in their mind. Good writing creates a cadence for the reader and allows their eyes to flow smoothly across the page. If a reader stops or stumbles and must repeat a line, it’s a sign of bad rhyme and bad writing.

Shakespeare’s work endures to this day not only because of the brilliant plots and legendary wordplay, but also because the words sounds so damn good when spoken out loud. He relied on the same prose structure for most of his major works (iambic pentameter), which created a skipping rhythm that is extremely easy to follow and remember.

Improving Your Aural Rhyme

We’ll start with a few ways you can keep your rhymes tight for the listener’s ear.

Read Your Writing Out Loud

Nothing will improve your writing more than reading it out loud.

Not only will you catch silly errors, but you’ll also get a feel for how the words lay on the reader’s ear. What sounded great in your head suddenly falls flat. A bit of literary engineering, shifting some clauses, and it’s better than ever.

Reading out loud shifts you from being the writer to being the reader. You hear your own words from the reader’s perspective and realize how pretentious, awkward, and, on rare occasions, brilliant your writing is.

Stress Beats

When reading any passage, you subconsciously put stress on certain syllables in a sentence. Native English speakers emphasize major nouns, verbs, and other important words.

Writers must be aware of where the beats are and how many words they are trying to stuff between each beat. You’ll probably never actually diagram your sentence with stress marks, but you will find that omitting or adding words here and there just makes it sound better.

As an example, here’s a line I rewrote from Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art:

Resistance  has a way of  distracting  you and would do  anything  to  direct your  focus  away from the  most   important  thing you should be  doing  right  now .

This sentence sucks. It doesn’t rhyme and is hard to follow. There are way too many stress beats (noted in bold)–so much so that it loses any punch it had.

Here’s Pressfield’s original, unedited line:

Resistance  will tell you  anything  to keep you from doing your  work .

Much crisper, and a much better rhyme. This is a good example of how you often need to reduce your sentences to their core to make them stronger.

While most people should shorten their sentences, really artful writers can produce long sentences that are quite rhythmic and keep their beat across many clauses.

Here’s a longer sentence that flows well from Frederick Buechner:

Maybe the reason is not that the rich are so wicked that they are kept out of [heaven], but that they’re so out of touch with reality that they can’t see it’s a place worth getting into.

Contractions and Speed

It seems rather flighty when I do and do not decide to use a contraction. Sometimes it sounds right, sometimes it sounds wrong. At the core is the word stress issue. If you are trying to get quickly to a major word, a contraction will reduce the time it takes to get there.

When you have a lot of filler words between major words, you encourage the reader to breeze through and read quickly. When you use mostly major words, you force the reader to slow down. For example, it takes me about four seconds to say the Pressfield quote. But I say the Buechner quote in seven seconds, despite the fact that there are more than three times the number of words.

Ways to Kill Your Rhyme

These are parts of your writing you must ruthlessly weed out so that your rhyme doesn’t trip up your reader.

Tense

Nothing kills a rhyme faster than mixing up complicated verb tenses. The best verb tense is the simplest. Adding perfects, progressives, and modals will complicate your message and should only be used when the situation demands it.

Use the simple present when writing articles, and the simple past when relating a story. For any other usages, apply for a permit.

Here’s an overdone bad example:

Many CFOs will be analyzing their reports in a deep way to maximize where they would get the best ROI.

Here’s an improvement:

CFOs analyze their reports intently to determine the best ROI.

…and also an example that a better verb can do the job of an entire clause.

Some more best practices for verb tenses:

• Don’t change tenses in a paragraph. This is a very common error and subconsciously makes a reader think you are scattered.
• Progressive tenses (was studying, is looking) can almost always be changed to simple (studied, looks), unless you are comparing things in time.

Point of View

Another subconscious thing readers pick up on is who is talking and who is being talked to. The easiest way to tell is to look at the pronouns. How often do you use the words “I” and “we”? What about “you”? I find that in writing standard internet articles, unless I am regarded as the expert in the topic, it’s best to stick to second person. Writing in third person (he/she/it) is considered more formal, but can be harder to make a connection with the reader, and also requires some linguistic gymnastics to avoid things like “One should be careful when applying this advice.”

Jumping between points of view is a mark of an immature writer with bad rhyme.

Keep your subject and verb close

Your verb is the most sacred part of your sentence. But without the noun, it doesn’t mean much. Don’t separate the noun and verb unless you must. The more words you put in between the subject and verb, the harder it is for the reader to find the beat.

Business  that are forward thinking and have a progressive hiring strategy  will  always  maintain  a healthy advantage over the competition.

By adopting a progressive hiring strategy,  businesses can maintain  a healthy advantage over the competition.

Vary your sentence length and construction

If all of your sentences start sounding the same in length and construction, it sounds like a broken record and makes the reader lose interest quickly. This is especially hard if you do any SEO writing with keywords. You will be tempted to use the keyword at the start of each sentence. But this becomes obvious and heavy-handed. Find ways to use the keyword as the predicate as well as the subject.

Mix up your sentences. Use a short one, then a command. Then, throw in a long sentence that drags on for a little while and enables you to stretch out your point. Close with something short. #iseewhatididthere

Don’t overuse pronouns

Pronouns are very helpful when you are working on your beat because they don’t distract from your verb. However, when you use too many pronouns, the reader can get lost in the rhyme without any reference. Never use two pronouns in a sentence that refer to two different things.

Use synonyms

Repeating the same words in a sentence makes for bad aural rhyme.

He wanted to take the boy to the show because the boy hadn’t been to a show in years.

He wanted to take the boy to the show because the kid hadn’t seen a performance in years.

The second one isn’t a masterpiece, but it sure sounds better.

Any kind of repeated word can be a distraction when a reader is trying to find your rhyme. Make good use of synonyms to move your writing along. You can repeat the same point without breaking out of your rhyme. Heck, you could say your main point again and no one would get lost in the flow. #iseewhatididthere

As you aim for better writing, nothing beats reading your work out loud. Make sure that it flows and rhymes well, and your readers will appreciate you.

Comments and talented writers looking for work will both be responded to at [email protected]