Elbow, Peter. "The Music of Form." College Composition and Communication. 57:4 (June 2006): 620-666.

Elbow relates writing to art forms, showing the correlations and differences between experiencing each kind of work. For instance, someone who experiences a visual piece of art can see it all at once; however, a reader of an art, or work, is likened to an ant on a canvas, taking in it bit by bit, but not being able to see the whole piece at once. "When we read a text, we are like the ant. The text is laid out in space across multiple pages, but we can only read one small part of it at a time" (621). The writer is obligated, then, to bring the reader through the work through an artistic organization that makes the reader want to stay with the entire piece, as a musician draws a listener through a piece.

Elbow draws a parallel between writing and music -- how does a musician keep an audience, and likewise a writer? "... the answer is the same one that applies to music. Successful writers lead us on a journey to satisfaction by way of expectations, frustrations, half-satisfactions, and temporary satisfactions: a well-planned sequence of yearnings and reliefs, itches and scratches" (626). The form of the writing should be more exciting, then, than a traditional five-paragraph essay, which gives away its crescendo by announcing its intention at the beginning of the work.

"In short, our very understanding of what organization means -- with its implicit spatial metaphor -- seems better suited to describing the organization of objects in space than the organization of events in time. Ifwe want to do better justice to the form of temporal events, we need more attention to the problem of written language as buried in time -- and the potentialities for binding time ...

...But writing is not music. Writing offers various resources to helpreaders compensate for its embeddedness in time -- resources largely unavailable in music. Writing centers on a semantic dimension (verbal meaning) that we don't usually find in the abstract, nonsemantic medium of time" (628).

The reader cannot escape the time of the work. Elbow likens time to both the narrative and also the cohesion or motion of the work. "I'm interested in what we might call dynamic cohesion -- (and) dynamic coherence where we're pulled from element to element ... where the parts of the essay don't just sit together because they are semantically linked, rather, we feel them pulled together with a kind of magnetic or centripetal force. Dynamic cohension and dynamice coherence create the music of form.

"Suppose we've made clear thesis statements and maps of organization, but readers are tired and bored or in a bad mood? if we can pull readers through and give them pleasure and satisfaction from reading, they are more likely to carry on and even to be more sympathetic to the ideas we are trying to sell. Consider the typical problem of textbooks: they are impressively well organized in all these signposting ways (along with the best graphics that money can buy). Yet they often put readers to sleep" (633).

This seems, to me, to be another example between the differences in the way writing is emphasized between composition and creative writing -- in the latter, we are looking for the rhythm of the piece just as much as we are looking for the natural order of the thoughts.