Writing Techniques that Sing: Creating Resonance with Words

Have you ever had that sense that you were reading something truly powerful? Your heart rate goes up, you lean in closer to the text, and all the neurons in your brain start tingling. You comprehend what the author is saying in three- or four- or maybe even five-dimensional detail. Your e-book shows you that three thousand readers have underlined that particular paragraph or phrase; you do the same.

How do we learn to write nonfiction like that—so that our readers feel the impact of our words in their bodies and minds? What makes the difference between prose I forget and prose I remember and act on? How can we add a ponderous quality that readers will, well, ponder?

If you’ve attended a middle school science class in the past hundred years, you probably know that all matter is made of atoms. Because of their kinetic energy, unconfined gas atoms move about largely unrestricted, and even the atoms of solid matter vibrate. We know these facts yet probably few of us regularly visualize our world, including our bodies, at an atomic level.

But if this kinetic theory of atoms is true, then our bodies, though they move on a macro-level by employing muscle and tendons, and on a micro-level by converting glucose and oxygen, they also move on an atomic level through pulsing particles. When we say to someone, “We’re on the same wavelength,” meaning our ideas line up and we understand each other, we might actually be vibrating on some level at the same frequency. Our entire universe pulses with this connective energy.

Voices also have a particular energy. Vocal cords vibrate air particles to make sound waves. Some voices have the power to engage our attention like no others: James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, even Cate Blanchett. Their deep tones resonate in our ears and our bodies. Like the lion’s roar that you feel echo inside your chest, these voices command authority and gravitas.

I have written a lot on the power of story and illustration, tools that hold a dynamic place in nonfiction as well as fiction. Even treatise writers on eukaryotic cells can embed basic principles of story as they explain the movement, processes, and development of an amoeba—or the ways in which certain amoeba in our water sources can infect the human brain and cause death.

But we don’t always need story to create powerful connections with readers. Language itself, formed well around potent ideas, can rumble with all the reverberation of a hungry lion. We don’t need Darth Vader or Galadriel’s deep voice for our words to rise up and resound. What we do need is to catalyze our writing beyond cliché, inert syntax, and single-poled reason to sensory, musical, and intuitive resonance.

Beyond Cliché (to Sensory Resonance)

Many nonfiction writers fill their essays with clichés, empty phrases, and linking verbs (be-verbs, seems, appears, feels, etc.). Such language lacks power. Our informal idiom may seem to invoke a commonality with readers but merely leaves them wanting. With excess weight and weak verbs, sentences fail to launch. The various clichéd images and ideas, like random, multidirectional waves, collide and cancel each other out.

Example: There are many blind spots in writing where authors think they are hitting the target with their language and getting down to where the rubber meets the road, but they actually miss the boat and say next to nothing.

There are	empty phrase
blind spots	optical nerve analogy
in writing . . . authors	potential redundancy; authors by definition write
they are	weak verb
hitting the target	marksmanship cliché
with their language	modification needed to adjust weak metaphor
getting down	perhaps black slang for “achieve sense of brotherhood” or “reducing to essentials,” such as from the cliché “getting down to brass tacks”
where the rubber meets the road	traction cliché for “what matters”
miss the boat	sea travel cliché for missed opportunity or lateness
next to nothing	wordy phrase for “little”

 

 

Rewrite: Authors communicate less than they intend when they rely on unexamined, common phrasing.

But what happens when we pause a moment to think of our topic in terms of concrete, sensory imagery? What about unified imagery, a metaphor that we can carry throughout an essay? A good overarching image aligns the parts and creates bonds and structure in much the same way that heat and pressure transform carbon atoms into a diamond. Not only does a unifying image add brilliance, it adds resonance when all the various parts vibrate in harmony or unison.

You can add your unifying image to your essay through figures of speech but also by merely making smart verb and noun choices. (When you’ve finished reading, go back and count how many verbs and nouns in this essay relate to kinetic energy, chemistry, physics, and the formation of crystals.)

Go beyond surface-thinking and plumb the depths of your experience for comparisons and analogies that illuminate your ideas. Elevating language in nonfiction isn’t about creating pompous or pretentious literary writing but empowering the reader to comprehend a deeper message and remember it.

Moving beyond cliché requires us to think longer about what we want to communicate, and it also forces us to ask more questions about what we think and our attitudes surrounding those ideas. When you add your intuitive-pattern-thinking to your logical-reason-thinking, you generally move to higher mental processes, beyond comprehension and even analysis to synthesis and evaluation.[2] Moving beyond cliché requires delving into deeper recesses of human experience and revealing many facets of these gems at once.

How to Create Sensory Resonance

Weak verbs and adjectives (e.g., is, becomes, beautiful, good, nice, special, awesome, etc.) reduce clarity. Overworked phrases that no longer conjure strong images or that rely on stereotypes (clichés) fall flat.

Let’s propose that you want to write a social science essay on the cyclical trap of poverty and push back against the common misperception that the majority in poverty fail to succeed due to laziness, moral failing, and incompetence.

At first thought, you write this:

The poor of our city are beautiful. They work hard and, out of their lack, give generously to their neighbors.

It’s a good start. Straightforward and to the point. But you have a page limit, and these word choices add little to hint at the many influencing social factors you want to mention. You really want to launch and land your discussion in a memorable way. Are these the best sentences to use? You have several adjectives and adverbs that communicate abstractly (beautiful, hard, generously) and while you have two active verbs (work and give) they provide basic concepts that you felt needed modifying (hard and generously).

Your first sentence gives a stative idea, an equation of those in poverty with beauty. Your second sentence tries to answer the how and why questions that follow that stative statement. Yet, you ask your sentences, what makes working hard and sharing “beautiful”? The end of your second sentence hints at the answer: those with few resources share the little they have with others in similar circumstances. But you realize you’ve left some ideas off the table here: Small giving despite a lack is lovelier than medium generosity despite plenty. And circumstances often force the impoverished to live in dilapidated settings, in the run-down parts of the city, while those economically better off flee to the suburbs.

How might you incorporate all those ideas in approximately the same space of two sentences? You play with some images and write the following:

The poor beautify our cities. Their hands glisten with a generosity that the rich, with all their jewels, can only mimic.

Now the beauty of the poor does something rather than stagnate as a stative description (“Pretty is as pretty does,” right?). Not only do we see beauty in the people, but they also add beauty by their actions. We read that their presence in some way redeems the worn-out places of our world.

In sentence two, you’ve removed the work concept and focused on the poor’s generosity, symbolized by “their hands”[3] that “glisten” brighter than the charity of the rich. You’ve not only demonstrated how the poor add beauty to the city, but you’ve also flipped a concept on its head: that the resources of the wealthier citizens make them rich. Instead, their precious jewels only mimic the beauty of the generous poor.  You’ve left the most surprising word for last, and both sentences resonate with a richer, sensory meaning than the ones you started with.

Beyond Syntax (to Musical Resonance)

So sensory language harnessed to meaning adds resonance. The rhythm and patterns of language also increase resonant power, by stirring and echoing emotional memory. Good writing goes beyond accuracy of syntax to sentence construction that adds musical resonance and unity to a thesis.

The day before the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed up into the wee hours of the night writing and editing his speech. He and his advisors felt this speech had to be different than the ones he had given before. The next day he would address the nation outside of the black church and the civil rights movement. All three television networks would cover the event live.

The manuscript he took to the podium held much to commend it, beginning with a “five score” nod to the signer of the Emancipation Proclamation and the orator of “four score and seven years ago” fame. King evoked rich sensory connections to the hope of daybreak, to cashing the promissory note given all people in the Declaration of Independence, and to the needed change to an autumn of freedom from a sweltering, oppressive summer. But as he spoke to the masses after a long, hot day of speeches, and neared “his final words, it seemed that he, too, could sense that he was falling short. He hadn’t locked into that power he so often found.”[4]

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out from the dais, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Twice she interjected.[5]

King paused. Then he set his manuscript aside. “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,” he said, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’”

“I have a dream . . . I have a dream . . . I have a dream today!” Luther’s powerful, repetitive rhetoric—and the Baptist preacher passion that overtook him as he delivered it—created music with crescendos and rhythmic patterns and words. These are the words people remember most of his speech. These are the words that echo in our souls and in all the souls of those who have yet to see this longed-for dream fully realized.

We tend to find parallelism compelling and memorable. Parallelism creates order, rhythm, and relationship. It is a primary component of Hebrew poetry and wisdom literature. Many, if not most of the most beloved speeches and literary lines include some form of parallelism:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1–4 ESV)

Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. (JFK) [6]

To be or not to be, that is the question. (Hamlet)[7] \

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. (Mark Antony in Julius Caesar)[8]

But not all nonfiction essays lend themselves to such obvious oratory and persuasive rhetoric.  Earthquake-level vibrations aren’t always allowed. Often, we must inform and inspire with softer notes and frequencies. We do this by altering standard syntax.

Grammar matters, and poor grammar inhibits communication. But knowing how to proficiently modify grammar—or break its rules—actually increases comprehension. Poet, essayist, and teacher David Jauss remarks,

We may not alter our own intellects when we alter our syntax, but by discovering and expressing them, we must may alter our readers’ intellects. Indeed, it’s possible that one of the things we talk about when we talk about flow is the feeling that the writer’s syntax is altering our consciousness, making us think—and therefore feel—in new ways.[9]

And Carol Saller, author of The Subversive Copy Editor, writes,

Repetition, alliteration, long sentences, comma splices—almost any writing foible that we tend to see as problematic can work brilliantly in the right place, and a good ear will recognize when it works and when it doesn’t.[10]

Play with rhythm and repetition. Build your crescendos and one-word whispers. Remember that the universe sings in the background, a steady B-flat.[11]

Beyond Reason (to Intuitive Resonance)

Those who spend effort adding resonance to language acknowledge, if even subconsciously, that how we purport to function and make choices (reason) is not how we actually make choices (intuition). Jonathan Haidt describes this process as the rider and the elephant. We think that the rider, with his logical, rational choices, is steering the elephant, but in reality the elephant—our emotional and intuitive subconscious processes—is much stronger than the rider and takes the rider where it wants to go.[12]

Some academics and technical writers, by design, must write with as much objectivity as possible, linking facts together with measurable conclusions and removing emotional bias. That’s fair. We need dry, fact-based information (written with strong verbs) to help us learn and make conclusions. But probably the majority of us work and write in disciplines that allow for some persuasion, even if we are persuading readers to equally consider both sides of an issue. And facts don’t stir the elephant; relevance, human longing, core values, and emotional triggers do.

When you write with illustrations that show you connect with the reader’s experience, you create a bond that leans the elephant—a sort of magnetism that pulls elephant and rider in that direction and allows the rider to consider your logic. If illustrations (analogies, pictures, or stories) attract the elephant, so does figurative language, though perhaps with a smaller force. But layering your images and well-thought-out diction increases magnetic pull in the same way multiple magnets do.

How to Create Musical and Intuitive Resonance

Let’s return to our essay about poverty. You want to help your reader detach from presumptions about emotionally laden words like success and privilege while considering the statistically valid conclusions you’ve made about our class structure and its consequences for society. You wiggle your synapses and decide to use a chemistry analogy, the states of matter, to explain your point.

You write,

The poor in our cities are like atoms in a solid state, vibrating with energy but contained, restricted, and required to stay put. They live in a universe of the wealthy and powerful, those who, like gas particles, though small in number, either take up an inordinate amount of space and bombard and ricochet off the poor at will or flee and leave a vacuum, suffocating the impoverished by taking all the oxygen particle with them. Even the middle class ebbs and flows like water, flooding jobs, schools, and the suburbs while the poor stand still, empty-handed, overwhelmed, quivering under their seeable surface with rage.

Not bad. The states of gas, liquid, and solids have no implicit privilege bias or emotional baggage and, therefore, can perhaps help the reader see the situation of each class a bit more objectively. Most readers understand our universe works on these scientific principles; matter acts how it acts. (But, the implicit question asks, should we?)

But the passage has some clunky rhythms, and the ending fails to ring. Every sentence is multi-phrased, pushing the reader forward as though caught up in a current. You start by tackling the unwieldy second sentence. The strong verbal idea suffocate gets lost as the reader sweeps by, so you decide to remove some wordiness and land the sentence there:

They live in a universe of the wealthy and powerful, those who, like gas particles, though small in number, either take up an inordinate amount of space and ricochet off the poor at will or flee and leave a vacuum, condemning the impoverished to suffocate.

Then you see that your final sentence mixes the flowing middle class with the stationary poor. You decide to heighten the contrast by ending the sentence where the flowing phrases arrive at a triplet of stressed syllables:

Even the middle class ebbs and flows like water, flooding jobs, schools, and the suburbs while the poor stand still.

And as a final note, you decide to break grammar rules and create a series of stops to represent the stuttering stickiness the keeps the poor from moving up. You also notice that “seeable surfaces,” a pair of dactylic words,[13] creates more movement than you’d like. You think on other ways to convey “seeing below the surface” and realize you can turn a cliché about car mechanics, “under the hood,” into a pun about poor neighborhoods. Your final paragraph looks something like this:

The poor in our cities are like atoms in a solid state, vibrating with energy but contained, restricted, and required to stay put. They live in a universe of the wealthy and powerful, those who, like gas particles, though small in number, either take up an inordinate amount of space and bombard and ricochet off the poor at will or flee and leave a vacuum, consigning the impoverished to suffocate. Even the middle class ebbs and flows like water, flooding jobs, schools, and the suburbs while the poor stand still: Empty-handed. Overwhelmed. Quivering under the hood with rage.

Beyond the Universe: A Final Echo

Atoms line up not because of pretension, but because the same frequency, magnetism, or charge connects them, places them within the same period, and compels them to remain. Authors create resonance in a similar way, adjusting language, imagery, and syntax until all the vibrations synchronize. Let’s remember that whenever we write or preach or inform, we must aim beyond rational assent and a focus on the seat of logic, beyond the facts, the knowledge, to how we experience and interact with that knowledge, the consequences to our societies, our emotional welfare, and the longing of our souls.

We create whole worlds with language. But what we create rarely denies what is already present. Even when we deny a First Cause, our language usually reflects the unseen forces in our universe, our needs, our perceptions, and our longing for beauty. Many of us perceive this pattern confirms that the Word is. And that the universe became, made by his wisdom (Proverbs 8: 1–31). Our words can help communicate that wisdom and delight.

I find nowhere in Scripture dry, factual language with weak clichés and words, do you? Do you want your whisper to reverberate like the roar of a lion? Use strong imagery and diction. No matter your discipline, words resonate when they harmonize with God. Make him your force, and may that force always be with you.

Notes

[1] William Safire, “On Language; GETTING DOWN,” The New York Times, January 18, 1981, sec. Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/18/magazine/on-language-getting-down.html.

[2] Newer models of Bloom’s taxonomy call these levels “evaluation” and “creation.” See Donald Clark, “Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains: The Cognitive Domain,” Big Dog and Little Dog Performance Juxtaposition, accessed September 20, 2019, http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html.

[3] This literary trope is called metonymy, where the word you use is associated with the idea it stands for, such as “the crown” for the concept of reigning over a nation. In this case, we generally use our hands to give. A similar figure, synecdoche, employs a part for the whole or vice versa, as in “He had a hand in building the business.” A hand is only part of what the man used to do his job.

[4] Gary Younge, “Martin Luther King: The Story behind His ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech,” The Guardian, August 9, 2013, sec. US news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/martin-luther-king-dream-speech-history.

[5] Younge, “Martin Luther King: The Story behind His ‘I Have a dream’ Speech.”

[6] John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, January 20, 1961.

[7] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.

[8] William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2.

[9] David Jauss, On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft. (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2011), 69.

[10] Carol Saller, “Do You Overstep When Editing Fiction? Three Easy Cures,” CMOS Shop Talk (blog), September 17, 2019, https://cmosshoptalk.com/2019/09/17/do-you-overstep-when-editing-fiction-three-easy-cures/.

[11] See “Have You Heard About B Flat?,” NPR.org, accessed September 19, 2019, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7442915 and Dennis Overbye, “Music of the Heavens Turns Out to Sound a Lot Like a B Flat,” The New York Times, September 16, 2003, sec. Science, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/science/music-of-the-heavens-turns-out-to-sound-a-lot-like-a-b-flat.html.

[12] Listen to a summary of salient points from Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind at Tom Woods, The Rider & the Elephant - Jonathan Haidt on Persuasion and Moral Humility, accessed September 19, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24adApYh0yc.

[13] A dactyl is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.