Musical Text

I saw this clipping from a book when browsing threads one day.¹

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This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, this is important. So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Write music.

I’m no writer, but I am more pedantic about writing than most. Growing up homeschooled does that to you. So when I saw this I thought YES. FINALLY. Somebody giving clear advice on how to make your writing not feel like corpo-chatgipitty slop. Save. Scroll.

Some time later I still thought about that post. It’s a nice idea, but how would I actually write that way in practice? The colors were so pretty in the picture, but no editor highlights sentences like that. Right? right?…

I use Obsidian. I can go off about how I use Obsidian later, but I use it. And I know that Obsidian is super customizable, like ridiculously customizable. It has a whole community plugin store where anybody can throw together a little code and change any aspect of the app, from adding entirely new functionality to simply moving a button or changing the color scheme. I can code. A little. I can read docs and I know someone who can help me out with the rest, lArGE LaNguAge mODEls.

A few evenings of messing around and ta-fricken-da I had myself a plugin.

For a first-time Obsidian plugin dev, I’m happy with it. I knew I wouldn’t make something perfect on the first go but I did want to make it good. The toggle is contained to individual tabs. It doesn’t change any of your source text. The colors are fully customizable, sentence length thresholds too. It’s nice.

Search for “Musical Text” in the community plugins section of Obsidian settings and give it a try.