The story is an old one. A New England editor covered a meeting of his town council. The principal item on the calendar was a popular proposal to fund a park. After a short discussion, the item carried almost unanimously. Returning to his office, the editor typed an account of the proceeding.

“Mayor Cabot,” he wrote, “cast the only dissenting vote.”

Then the editor reconsidered. Without altering its meaning in any way, he recast the sentence to read, “The mayor cast the lone dissenting vote.”

With a stroke of the pen, so to speak, he had achieved a line of perfect iambic pentameter. The MAY-or CAST the LONE diss-ENT-ing VOTE. He had added a touch of cadence to his story – and for a split second he had made it a more readable piece.

It is a truism – my truism, anyhow – that we read the good stuff not only with our eyes but also with our ears. We see the written word. Inwardly, we hear it too.

Today’s ruminations reach beyond the mundane prose of a market report. We’re talking about the writing art at its most delightful levels. More to the point, we’re fiddling around with the little dog tricks of prose composition. These include the devices of cadence, alliteration, onomatopoeia, repetition, antithesis and a dozen others, but “cadence” alone will do for today.

The theory behind these ruminations is that we live amidst the myriad rhythms of everyday life: Seasons come, seasons go; tides ebb, tides flow. The heart beats, a clock ticks – and if the clock falls suddenly silent, we miss its rhythmic beat. When we read old-fashioned poetry, we are consciously aware of its cadence: Scott’s “stag at eve had drunk his fill, where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,” and Frost’s little horse must have thought it queer “to stop without a farmhouse near.”

To add a pinch of cadence to a broth of prose is trickier. Such seasoning surely can be overdone, but in moderation, like amending “only” to read “lone,” the pinch can be remarkably effective. Consider, for example, a perfectly acceptable sentence from an account in The New York Times last May about an expensive motor home: “The electronics on board … rival those of a Silicon Valley bachelor pad.”

Could that sentence have been usefully tweaked? It generally is a bad idea to dragoon proper nouns, such as “Silicon Valley,” into service as adjectives, but we can reach for a pinch of cadence. Suppose we try, “a bachelor pad in the Silicon Valley.” The bachelor pad begins to swing.

Two years ago, the Times editorialized on capital punishment. In her final sentence, the editor warned that the United States is becoming isolated “as a growing number of nations become unwilling to extradite prisoners if they may be executed.”

Let us tinker. The final sentence of an editorial (or a short speech or essay) ought to end with a bang, not a whimper. This one ended on the multisyllable “executed.” It sort of, you know, kind of, drifted off … Suppose we recast the concluding clause: “become unwilling to extradite prisoners if they may be put to death.” The sentence gains the final snap of a hangman’s noose.

In Virginia, a Republican candidate for governor said something unkind about his Democratic opponent. “He has more flip-flops than a Virginia Beach souvenir shop.” The idea was good, but the cadence was lousy. Would alliteration have helped the simile? “More flip-flops than a souvenir shop in Sarasota”? Nahhh! Sarasota’s in Florida, and this election is in Virginia.

Tinker, tinker! If we keep practicing scales, someday our prose will sing.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columist. E-mail him at [email protected].