Each phrase of a sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole judge.
--Robert Louis Stevenson, Learning to Write 209 (1888; repr. 1920).
1 comment:
AMEN!!!
(Though Stevenson himself can't have honestly believed that he lived up to this ideal... Some of his writing is definitely less-than euphonious.)
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