Do You Feel That Beat? How to Write Like a Songwriter

Rhythm in music and writing is an essential element to a successful song or blog. Every article has its own rhythm that evokes emotion, creates trust and authority. They contain the heartbeats of your style, knowledge, and enthusiasm.

Feel that beat? Feel that pounding sensation that goes boom, boom, boom? That’s rhythm. It makes your body feel as if it should keep time. It’s a universal language that everyone understands. It can be heard and felt by anyone. It echoes its message in our thoughts and emotions. Timing is everything.

Rhythm in music and writing is an essential element to a successful song or blog. In a song, the rhythm is the backbone. It is often created by the percussive instruments, like drums and bass. It is the foundation on which everything else is built, and keeps it solid and steady.

Your blog is a foundation and your articles make your key notes, your highlights. To break it down further, each article has its own rhythm that evokes emotion, creates trust, and authority. They contain the heartbeats of your style, knowledge, and enthusiasm.

Here are 4 ways on how to write like a songwriter:

1. Add Rhythmic Flow
You, as a copywriter, create rhythm with your words. Just like a good songwriter, your words will echo in the heads of your readers, and they will recall what they felt when they read your work.

In writing, rhythm and slight repetition helps your writing sink into the consciousness of your readers. Notice, I say slight repetition. Don’t overdo it!

Have you ever had a set of song lyrics or music that gets stuck in your head? Your goal as a writer is to get a similar response to your writing. Imagine a bouncing ball over the lyrics to a song. For example: She loves me yeah, yeah, yeah…, She loves me yeah, yeah, yeah…, She loves me yeah, yeah, yeah… (The Beatles) compared to: Sell Your Crap… Pay Off Your Debt… Do What You Love! (Man vs. Debt). These are short examples, but both of these evoke a rhythmic emotion.

2. Reduce Sentence Length
Beware of long sentences when developing rhythm for your writing. Long sentences tend to lose strength and effectiveness the longer they get.

Imagine that punctuation is a set of instruments. Your periods are the beats of a drum and commas are the tinkle of a cymbal. Long sentences require commas and sprinkle your writing with tinkles. Short sentences give your writing that pound of a drum. The drum is what you’re aiming for, but not too steady.

Writing varies a bit from music and has its own type of rhythm. Sentences of the same length will bore your readers, so you want to have a mixture of length. The following is an example from one of my posts, it’s like poetry:
You’re frustrated, I know.
You work your ass off and there is no one visiting your blog.
You fire up your analytics to see the dismal numbers.
You want to close your virtual doors to the world.
You want to quit.
Why not? No one cares, no one visits, no one reads…

3. Leave Sentence Fragments
Sentence fragments are also very effective at creating rhythm. Leaving just a little out makes it sound conversational and rhythmic. This is the way most people talk. If you take a look at some popular copywriters or bloggers, you’ll see this conversational style throughout their work. It connects with the reader on a personal level. Big time. And that’s the secret to most of their success.

Let’s take a look at how to do this:

“Hey everybody! Just got this great idea. Ever heard of inbound marketing? Cool stuff. Drives traffic to your site like crazy.”

Conversational, short, fragmented, and exciting. Compare it to this:

“Inbound marketing is a modern technique for increasing web traffic to a website.”

Boring. I think I fell asleep writing it. Try it for yourself.

4. Rhythm Techniques
Want more rhythm to your writing? Start by reading your writing out loud. You’d be surprised to find some hidden flaws when hearing your own words. Compare this to some of your favorite authors. Does it have the same rhythm, or does it feel jagged and unpolished? Re-write and shorten, or lengthen some areas.

We all have an internal sense of rhythm. We just need to tap, tap, tap along and get it into words.

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• How Long Should My Sentences Be?
• The Effects of Music on the Brain
• Building Sentences Worksheets and Printables
• They Said What?! 3 Examples of Brands Having Fun with Words
• Fragmentary Sentences and Sentence Fragments