I know cadence can add power to writing and pleasure to reading. I can sometimes spot good candence when I see it, as in the first two lines of Jeff Buckley's wonderful song "Hallelujah" which you may have heard in the movie Shrek. They frown on copied song lyrics here, so I'll just provide a link:

Hallelujah

The words chosen here are perfect. There must be a thousand ways to say the same thing, and a hundred that would fit the rhyme scheme. But any changes to these words weakens the cadence. Even without the music, the words themselves rise and fall with such psychic power that the score practically composes itself in your head.

I'm trained to be a humble engineer, not an artist. Give me solid rules about vectors or adverbs and I'll follow them faithfully to the end of the world. In this way I'm becoming pretty good with writing technicalities like POV and rising tension. But not cadence.

I've looked for the hard and fast rules of cadence, and I haven't found anything. I assume these rules do not exist. But perhaps there are tips? Guidelines? Exercises to improve one's skills?

Does anyone know anything about the arcane subject of cadence?

On a much smaller scale than writing books and stories, proper cadence enhances the naming of babies. Number of syllables in first and last name, noting where the accents are in the words, avoiding ending the first name and beginning the last name with the same vowel sound, and so on. Some names are so perfect, while others are just names. Functional, but nondescript.

Cadence in prose has similar considerations, but because of the mass of words, as opposed to a few names strung together, it's harder to pinpoint. Reading aloud or at least very deliberately in your head is the best way to catch its presence or absence.

A similar exercise is to transcribe conversations.

I find that reading out loud point out a lot of my fatal word choices.

Mary

I wrote a bit of poetry back long years ago, but never got into it the way some people do.

Anyways, I would suggest reading it aloud...seeing how it sounds. I've started doing that myself, I find quite a few problems that way. You might already do that, if so just pay more attention to the sound, over the content.

I managed to write a section a while back where every reader I tried it on (admittedly only 2 of them) stumbled over a particularly strong word because it broke a rhythm that had been built up over the last hundred words before it. That's a kind of effect that makes people notice what you're saying...
but those hundred words took me a day to write. Obviously you can't write an entire novel like that

I'm sure that reading aloud is good practice, and having someone else read it aloud is better, and that practice makes perfect. That would allow me to make subjective judgements, like "Sentence A is better than sentence B."

But what I'd really like is a perfect cadence formula. I'd like to be able to feed two sentences into the formula and get the result: "Sentence A scores 7.2 on the cadence scale, while sentence B scores 5.1."

I would also like the formula to tell me where sentence B is weak and where sentence A is strong.

And the same story or scene can be written in various types of cadence. Hemingway could have written Great Expectations in his own style, true to his own inherent cadence, while Dickens could have done The Sun Also Rises and it would have had the Dickensian feel to it -- all a function of syle, which includes cadence.

Even in poetry cadence can be different things. The most obvious example I can think of is Boots by Kipling:

quote:

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We're foot-slog-slog-slog-sloggin' over Africa,
Foot-foot-foot-foot-sloggin' over Africa--
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up and down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!

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Everything in that verse and in the rest of that poem forces the reader to hear and feel marching, yet Kipling could have written it with a different cadence, a more typically poetic one and still had an effective poem about soldiers marching.

Cadence in prose is the same, only less dramatically or obviously done.

I'd say that grammar-checkers and things like the Flesch Reading Ease evaluators are attempts to do what you're suggesting, Doc, but as has been discussed elsewhere on this site, those things are not exactly on the mark. It all comes down to having or developing an ear for cadence, I think.

But then, that's just me. <lifts shoulders in hopeless shrug>

(I thought of this before I got to the end where you talked about analyzing music, etc, by the way.)

As I was writing the above, I thought of how Shakespeare used iambic pentameter in his plays, and wondered if that isn't all you really need to do, Doc. If you don't like iambic, there's trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic. Or you could move around among them.

And they're no more helpful in the end. After all, a composer can easily tell whether or not his tempo is that of a march or a waltz. But that doesn't tell him whether it is a good march or waltz. Likewise, we can tell whether our prose is in iambic hexameter or amphimacer...but we can't tell whether it is effective by applying mathmatical analysis of the meter.

quote:

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I'm sure that it would be possible to gussy up a program that would analyze a passage and spit out how well it adhered to various meters...but what would be the point?

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I could think of one good reason. It would sell like hotcakes, even if it wasn't that good.

I don't think I'm going to worry about rhythms in my stories right now. I'll settle for enjoyable any day.

Thank you for the suggestions, Kathleen. I will give it a try. But it will probably hurt my already dismal productivity. I haven't got an ear for iambic, or any other rhythm, unless I am hearing it read aloud. When I do hear it, I can tell when an entire passage is bad but have trouble spotting the offending syllable.

I can detect the rise and fall of accents in the written word, but only subconsciously. I'd love to know how to develop a conscious sense of cadence.