Casting Stereophonic Spells that Serenade your Readers Down the Page
Romancing your readers with sound and rhythm
Writing is a serenade where you are romancing your readers down the page by casting stereophonic spells with the music of your words.
Your hope is to get readers in the mood to sing and dance along with you. You hope your words will be seductive and enticing enough to lure readers into a fun and magical stereophonic experience. For writing is, indeed, stereophonic.
The Magic of Stereophonics
Barbara Baig says in Spellbinding Sentences, when words are skillfully put together to “transfer ideas and images from a writer’s mind into the minds of readers — that, by itself is powerful verbal magic.”
I wrote about casting spells for emotional connection here.
Baig also says, “When we exploit the musical characteristics of language, we can make another kind of magic with our words.”
For our words create the magic of stereophonics. This stereophonic spell cast on readers is created through both sound and rhythm. Baig states that “through their sounds and rhythms, our words can ‘sing’ to readers, and move them in the way music does.”
The Stereophonic Spell of Sound
The first way a writer serenades a reader is by intentionally creating that stereophonic spell through the sound of her words. A writer purposefully puts words in “word-groups.” For some words just naturally “go together” and make mesmerizing music.
Writers combine words, phrases, and clauses that are separated by “tiny pauses that we make before and after these groups in order to process them properly as we read and write and speak,” says Baig.
Thus we create “breaks in the flow of sound coming out of the speaker’s mouth.”
For it is these pauses, these breaks in the flow of our words, that create “breathing spaces” in a piece of writing, whether it is a piece of music. Or a blog post, article or even a sales letter.
Making our Writing Sing
Every good piece of writing has breathing spaces or momentary pauses where readers take in the meaning of one group of words before moving onto the next group of words.
Baig says, “Making our writing ‘sing’ is learning ‘how to let our writing breathe.”
Baig also explains that loading the slots of our sentences rather than creating word phrases inhibits writing so it doesn’t breathe at all. “Writing that breathes is alive; writing that does not is dead,” states Baig.
And writing that breathes is either a natural or intentional occurrence of proper word phrasing and using punctuation to indicate a “unit of breath.”
The Breath-taking Moments
And then, when punctuation signals it, pausing.
For pauses are breath-taking moments. Some pauses are short, like the comma pause. Some pauses are longer like a semi-colon. And then there’s the longer, more noticeable pauses of the colon and period of a sentence.
But there’s also the brief pauses between a series of prepositional phrases.
“Keep your ear tuned to the pauses that create the ‘phrasing’ of your sentences” when you write, says Baig. For that is how you create those breath-taking moments where you are “singing on the page.” Simply because you “let the music of the words lead.”
Creating the Mood
We create the mood by intentionally phrasing our words and punctuating our sentences in order to create the effect, create the mood, in readers that we desire.
To create the mood, ask these questions: Will our reader actually hear those pauses? Will our readers slow down enough to get the true value and effect that we are hoping for? And will our readers enjoy the experience of what they are reading?
When we become as skilled at grouping words together as a good songwriter, we phrase lines like we were writing the words of a melody to “make words ‘sing’”.
Singing Begins with the Breath
According to Baig, “Singing always begins with breath, and breath is what shapes the phrases of a song.” For the expert songwriters compose music by arranging words and notes in breathtaking ways that have a memorable emotional impact on their audience.
And that is the skill writers who want to serenade their readers need to learn.
For that’s how a writer serenades her reader with melodies that sparks the flutter in one’s heart.
The Stereophonic Spell of Rhythm
The second way writers cast that stereophonic spell on readers is through the rhythm of their words.
Baig explains that “in music, every note is not given equal stress; it’s the way the stressed notes are repeated and varied that, along with other things, create the rhythm of a melody.”
In other words, it’s the rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed words and syllables that casts a stereophonic spell of one’s words.
Putting Emphasis on Words
Baig says people who speak English often have a “predisposition to emphasize, in each breath unit, one particular word, or the stressed syllable of a word. Typically the word that gets the most stress in spoken English comes at or near the end of a sentence.”
So, listen to the words as you, and others around you, speak.
Ask yourself, what words are others emphasizing because they deem it the most important thing they have to say. And pay attention to the length of yours and others’ phrases, clauses, and sentences.
The Rhythm of Repetition and Variation
Also pay attention to the repetition of certain words and word groups.
Then write your own version of what others say using repetition and variation of words, phrases and clauses.
In short, learn how to say what you want to say rhythmically so your readers can identify whether you are serenading them with pop music, rhythm and blues, or classical music.
For each kind of music has it’s own rhythm. Just like each piece of writing has its own rhythm. And writers can put more emphasis on certain parts of the sentence to change the rhythm.
A writer can emphasize the end of a sentence.
Or emphasize the beginning of a sentence. Or even put more emphasis at the end of those small breathing spaces. Or what Baig calls “interludes.”
Changing the Rhythm
And, thus, by changing the emphasis on certain words, you completely change the rhythm of that piece of writing.
For changing the patterns of emphasis and stress will ”create a different type of emphasis.”
The thoughts and ideas you stress as important creates certain rhythms and patterns in your readers’ mind. They affect the mood of your reader. As well as even possibly changing their entire song and dance through life.
The rhythm and flow of a piece of writing can cause readers to sway in time with that rhythm …
Casting a Stereophonic Spell
Because your phrasing and punctuation and the rhythmic flow of your words casts a stereophonic spell on a reader through one’s senses of sound and rhythm. They flow down the page in time with your rhythm as your words sing to them. Instead of being driven away towards music more to their liking.
So, what music are you playing for your readers? Are you serenading your readers with the sounds and rhythms that cast a stereophonic spell of heightened joy? Are you making your readers sing and dance to a new and daring sound that they love?
Serenading readers by putting words together that make readers reel in rhythmic bliss is being the writer who makes readers sing along in stereophonic ecstasy.
Are you that writer?
