4 ms·

This is a great point that's applicable to legal writing. Thank you for sharing it! Any chance you have a source where I could learn more about this aspect of

• FrankWilhoit 9mo ago
  Good question. The literature does not tend to be very informative on this point. It is a difficult topic to discuss because you can either handwave and presume agreement, or else go very deep. It has a lot to do with the amount and kind of repetition, and that is where the analogy between music and prose gets wobbly. The nearest thing we had to a Mozart in living memory was Stephen Sondheim. Something like "Comedy Tonight" would have been very familiar to Mozart, in purpose if not in all the details of execution. In terms of technical writing for multiple audiences, it comes immediately to vocabulary, and there, again, the analogy fails, because it is much harder to get away with using unfamiliar words. For your purposes, Churchill might be a more direct model than Mozart. Look particularly at how he deploys words of one syllable, two syllables, etc. to shape phrases and produce climactic rhythms. Occupational dialect, full of terms-of-art, is obviously an obstacle to this kind of thing.