In this chapter you will

1. • learn how our brains recognize the rhythm of sentences even when we read silently

2. • know how to handle items in a list or series

3. • discover how to create a sophisticated cadence to your sentences by varying their length and structure.

In our clumsy and unscientific way of assessing writing that works – or spectacularly fails to – we resort to using vague terms to diagnose issues that neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics can help us pinpoint. When, for example, readers fuzzily describe a paragraph as just not flowing, as we saw in Chapter 4, they're identifying discontinuities between sentences. But they're also straining to put a finger on something harder to pin down, the thing that most books on writing are content to breezily label style. Unfortunately, most of us aren't aiming for the next Nobel in literature (or even favorable critical reviews savoring our prose), so glowing explanations of how writers avoid clichés, use bracingly fresh analogies, or powerful rhetorical devices like antitheses are noticeably less helpful in getting our proposals or memoranda out the door than great lashings of caffeine. At 3 am, you don't give a shit whether you sound like Richard Dawkins at his most sparkling and original. You just want to avoid sounding like an illiterate, sleep-deprived, nine-year-old chucking together a report hours before your deadline.

Follow the four Cs and you'll end up sounding as though you've at least had the benefit of an education, in addition to ensuring your writing project will receive generous amounts of time, thorough attention, and thoughtful consideration. Notice if I'd said … in addition to giving your writing project generous amounts of thorough attention, thoughtful consideration about the mating habits of wombats, and time, you'll tilt toward the illiterate, sleep deprived and time-pressed nine-year-old end of the spectrum, rather than away from it. Why? Our notions of flow and style alike have one thing in common that few of us (aside from rhetoricians) consider – cadence.