Virginia Woolf wrote, “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.” When literature was principally oral, rhythm was even more obvious a quality, but since the advent of print, the art of ‘tacit reading aloud’—being aware of the rhythm of the prose, even silently—has remained. Writers and readers have long agreed that the rhythm of prose is inseparable from its power to convey. In this talk, Richard Cohen will discuss what makes good rhythm, the actual rhythms useful to improve one’s own writing, and the pieces of advice and tricks of the trade offered by writers of the past, from Aristotle and Flaubert to contemporary writing manuals.

Richard Cohen is the author of Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life (Random House, 2010) and By The Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions (Random House, 2002). He is a visiting professor in Creative Writing at the University of Kingston upon Thames, on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly, and writes frequently for publications such as the Times (London), the New York Times, Bloomberg News, and most London newspapers. He is currently writing a history of historians.

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The Writing Life events in 2014 were generously underwritten by Jenny Lawrence.