The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal techniques that compensate for the problem of time. In contrast, I’ll describe five ways to organize written language that harness or bind time. In effect, I’m exploring form as a source of energy. More broadly, I’m implying that our concept itself of “organization” is biased toward a picture of how objects are organized in space and neglects the story of how events are organized in time.