They’ve Got Rhythm

“STYLE IS a very simple matter: it is all rhythm,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter to the poet Vita Sackville-West. “Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.”

Trying to teach rhythmic prose, however, is a bit like trying to teach a hapless friend how to dance to a pop song in your living room. Yes, there are steps (a leg here, a hip there), corresponding to the beat, but there are also other rules more difficult to quantify: you can’t try too hard; you can’t be self-conscious.

Alas, some as an undergraduate. “There is still too much to see and marvel at,” Abbey wrote. “I lie on my belly on the edge of the dune, back to the wind, and study the world of the flowers from ground level, as a snake might see it.”