Iambic and Meaning

April 9

You know, a funny thing about style: when a sentence is iambic it seems to say better what it’s saying. The logic seems better. And not just the iambic, but when it flows better. And when you take out the extra words. Sometimes you could say either “rather than” or “instead of,” but picking the one that flows better for that sentence can make the sentence more convincing. I notice this over and over. Have you found this to be true?

April 12

The iambic effort is like cutting someone’s bangs. Once you do it on most of your sentences, “…you want to do it on all of them, and the bangs on the left need adjusting because of the bangs on the right, and you can end up with no bangs at all. I mean you can end up with a paragraph so concise it’s not a prose paragraph any more, but a poetic one, and you might wish you had your prose one back. You find yourself choosing between synonyms and different phrasing that say what you’re after, but also scan. That includes choosing some words that make this piece start sounding like poetry. And now the piece, which originally had the pleasingness of everyday words and diction, now has a somewhat overworked quality. “He’s trying too hard to sound poetic.” Yet once you’ve started making everything bounce along iambilically, it’s hard to resist doing it in all the remaining places. You get to a phrase that in ordinary prose would flow well enough, but in this prose it’s like stumbling over a brick, or having to do those three little quick-steps right before taking a long jump.