My third year of teaching at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism wound up last night, in a place called The Monday Club Bar in Harvard Square. Over tart lemonades, chic pizzas (flatbread with Meyer lemon and arugula) and “hot dates” (almond-stuff dates wrapped in bacon, broiled, and drizzled with balsamic vinegar), we reflected on a year of working together. Several fellows handed me rewrites of their final assignments, which ranged from reflections on 10 years of covering Cuba, to a war photographer’s account of watching the U.S. Marines take a bridge in Iraq, to an article about moms and boys, to a memoir about a swashbuckling dad who was a bush pilot in Lesotho.

We spent the last few weeks looking at the way different writers make their prose musical through the use of rhythm, and playing with the rhythm in our own paragraphs. I lectured these Nieman and Loeb fellows on parataxis and hypotaxis, even writing an essay on the search for rhythm to try to make some sense out of these somewhat obscure terms of lit crit.

I’ve streamlined a semester’s worth of lessons and put them into an online writing course. Try some of the exercises out! And if you’re a teacher, let me know you’re interested, and I’ll add you to a mailing list of like-minded souls trying to encourage good writing in their students.

I’ll end with a riddle: is this passage by Raymond Chandler, in Farewell, My Lovely, an example of parataxis or hypotaxis?

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”

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