Left. Left. Left, Right, Left…Finding the Cadence in Your Writing

I grew up on a military base, or more accurately many military bases. It was my childhood and life. Even today my idea of home is any place filled with military uniforms and flags.

Home is not a place, but a community—one I miss a great deal. I did, however, learn a lot growing up in that world. One of them was the value of cadence.

Admittedly, there wasn’t much cadence heard on an Air Force base, but I always loved hearing it whenever we ventured to the Marine and Army bases. There was a symmetry to it that sounded right.

It was pure rhythm. Simple and driving. It moved the story (and the troops) along with a beat that never altered. Sure there would skip a beat now and then for syncopation, but the base of the cadence was its uniformity. Its predictability.


This constant works great for cadence, but not so much for writing.

Writing is more like music composition. It needs modulations and rhythm. A simple cadence of “I did this” and “then I did that” is not enough. Action needs to move.

So does the rhythm of the words themselves. Read your piece aloud. Does it flow? Is it easy to read? Is there a pattern to the words that sounds good to the ear? Do you trip over words or struggle to pronounce the alliteration? Or are you falling into that trap of left, left, left, right, left or short sentence, short sentence, short sentence, long.

Most readers hear an inner voice when they read. Play to that. Move your story along, but add variations in the cadence or you will lose your audience by the end of the first click…er, I mean chapter.

I will write more about how to apply music composition to your writing in future blogs. I have to make use of my Music degree somehow, right? Besides, I learned as much if not more about writing from my music and theater classes than I did from my writing degree. I’ll be sharing those lessons in the weeks to come in a series I am calling “Lessons from Meisner, Adler and Bach.”