The Rhythm of Your Words (Ep. 8)
Can you control your audience's pace and rhythm when they read your article?
You're in charge. You have a story to tell. And it's up to you how you want to tell it. Your reader trusts you with the technical content, hopefully. But technical rigour is not enough. How you present your material matters. This includes the pace and rhythm of your post.
In traditional technical articles, the focus is on presenting the details of the topic coherently, systematically building layers on top of each other. The effectiveness of the article is closely linked to how well the author can structure the technical detail. However, this single-minded focus on the topic can lead the author to forget about the method of conveying that information.
Pace and rhythm • Think of your favourite speaker. Perhaps a comedian or a colleague who always gives engaging talks. Or a brilliant orator from recent history—recent enough that you've heard them speak live or through audio recordings—Churchill, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. One of the best orators I know is the headmaster at my son's school. But you're unlikely to know him, so I can't use him as an example.
These speakers control the pace and rhythm of their speech perfectly. They're in charge. They slow down. They speed up. They pause. They adapt the tone of their voice. Their words matter, but how they say them matters just as much.
You can still use similar techniques when writing. You have less control than when speaking, but you're still the one in charge. You can change your sentence lengths, use punctuation marks to punctuate the flow of the article. Even the words you choose matter—a reader will slow down when there are many longer words.
Back to the start • Go back to the first section of this post and reread the first two paragraphs. Bonus points if you can read them out aloud…
I wrote the first paragraph using a mixture of sentence lengths—some are short and some a bit longer. None are too long. There are many full stops. And the comma before "hopefully" gets you to pause, hopefully! (Readers, don't ignore punctuation!). The first sentence is short. The next two get progressively longer. A medium-length sentence follows these.
The second paragraph has longer sentences. If you try to read this paragraph out loud, you'll likely read it a bit slower than the first one. It also includes longer words.
Why? • When you read fiction and other narrative pieces, you experience this control of pace, knowingly or unknowingly. In fiction, the author controls the reader's mood so that it matches the mood of the story. Is this still relevant for technical articles? Perhaps, the emotional mood of the reader is less important when explaining Python or physics.
But there are other reasons for controlling the pace and rhythm of your article. The change in pace keeps the reader more engaged and less likely to get bored and lose concentration. It makes your reader's experience more enjoyable, and they're more likely to understand the content.
You can also highlight important points in your article by moderating your reader's speed. This is a more subtle form of emphasis than using italics or bold.
And your audience can get to know you as an author better. They can "hear" you and your voice as they read the article. Traditional technical articles strip this personal information from the text. And a reader who can connect with the writer is more likely to engage and understand.
Afterword • When I write a technical article, I imagine sitting in a cosy, quiet coffee shop with my ideal reader and casually chatting about the topic. I try to mirror that feeling in my writing.
I'm experimenting more with pace and rhythm in my technical articles. And I plan to read more about the topic, too. There are other techniques used often in narrative writing that we can adapt to technical articles. Expect to read more about this from time to time.
Stephen, do you think about visual aids as well when considering this presentation? It's gotta be holistic for me!