Finding Your Rhythm in Your Writing

It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with the posts hitting your social media feed or classic authors like Hemingway — everybody’s got their own voice that helps them stand out.

Broadly, your voice in your writing is how your personality comes across in your content. But you can also identify voice by asking, “How does the text flow?”

Flow has to do with elements like vocabulary, imagery, and syntax. But it’s how all of those pieces work together that determine the overall rhythm that the writing has.

Check out these examples:

👉For an instant, she thought she would stumble and fall, but at the last possible moment, she caught herself.

👉She thought — for an instant — she would stumble. Fall. She caught herself at the last moment possible.

The meaning in both of these examples is essentially the same. Yet they feel drastically different because of the rhythm. 

Now, here’s where it gets super cool.

Some of the preferences you might have for linguistic rhythm come from culture and experience. But linguistic preferences also tie to neuroscience. For example, your brain pays attention to the complexity in rhythm. Beta oscillations influence how well you can predict the beat pattern, which influences whether the rhythm makes sense and is pleasurable to you.

My hypothesis is that, when authors write, they naturally tap into their personal rhythmic preferences. But those preferences aren’t set in stone. They can shift through exposure and training. 

In this video, I encourage you to be more aware of the linguistic patterns you have to intentionally develop a voice that truly feels authentic and empowering to you. I also offer a caution about how leaning too heavily on artificial intelligence can be detrimental to building and maintaining a flow that’s all your own.

[Transcript summary]

When we talk about voice in writing, we are not just talking about how your personality comes across on the page, although that’s certainly part of it. From the technical standpoint, we are also talking about rhythm.

Now, there are a lot of different elements that play into this — for example, your vocabulary choices. But really, what I’m talking about is the flow that your writing has overall. So, for example, the samba feels different than the cha-cha, and writing is the same way based on how you put it together. And I believe that every writer has their own preferences for different rhythmic patterns, different beats, and the way that we prefer those, that becomes our voice.

Now, you can develop this over time. If you go to a different culture, you’ll learn a different language. Your ear will pick up on that, and that can shape what you do authentically in your writing. So, it’s not static. But I do want to encourage you as a writer to just be a little bit more self aware and say, “What patterns am I actually drawn to? What feels natural to me?” Because if you’re aware of it, you can really hone it, and you can be really super authentic and consistent in it.

Now, the caution that I want to give is, when we are seeing all of this AI, AI is not entirely bad. I think you can use it in some good ways. But when it comes to voice and rhythm, what happens — or at least, what I see — we see a lot of the same rhythm. And if you have a lot of the same rhythm, you don’t have that differentiation anymore. You lose voice. So, that is why I am encouraging you to be self aware about this and really say, “These are my patterns. This is what I prefer to do.” And you make a conscious choice to do that or to modify it in a way, but that it’s, it’s yours. You’re not just modeling it on the tech. This is what feels good to you, and it’s what you’re drawn to.

So, just be aware of that, and don’t necessarily use the tech to be your foundation.

Take care, everybody. Bye.