“When writing sounds good, it’s mostly because it has good rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It’s not so regular. If it were, it wouldn’t be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they’re simple and you just state them. But other times they’re more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.”
“An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of thought has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds good, it’s not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm, but because it has its natural one. Which means you can use getting the rhythm right as a heuristic for getting the ideas right.”
Paul Graham, Good Writing
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