Almost every musician has heard of music theory, and most musicians recognize that theory is useful to know.
But something many writers—including professional writers—aren’t aware of nowadays is that writing also has a rich and complete system of theory. Just as music theory observes and gives a name to every note, every chord, and every technique used in music… the art of rhetoric names virtually every possible technique used in writing.
In school many of us learned what metaphors and similes are. We learned how to rhyme. We may have learned about things like personification and alliteration. But many of us don’t end up using those figures of speech very often outside of the classroom. In time, we mostly forget about them, or maybe just use them instinctively.
I believe that reviewing and practicing these fundamentals is crucial to a lyricist. Learning grammar and rhetoric is just as useful as music theory. If you do choose to dig into rhetoric, you’ll find that metaphors, similes, and alliteration are only the very beginning. For centuries now, scholars of rhetoric have been noticing, naming, and organizing techniques. By my count, there are now well over a thousand different techniques for any writer to rediscover and play with.
You’ve likely constructed some metaphors in your life. You’ve made some analogies. You’ve used imagery. But have you tried chiasmus? Procatalepsis? Irony? Hyperbole? Climax? Gradatio?
Don’t let the complicated-sounding names fool you. Each one of these terms represents one simple, very useful little technique that can be learned and practiced and used to write something beautiful.
Although rhetoric is a very old art, dating all the way back to ancient Greece at the very least, rhetoric remains very relevant to modern writers. The topics discussed and some issues of style may change over the years, but the techniques are timeless. And rhetoric is all about technique.
One thing I hear again and again from songwriters is that they find lyric writing much more difficult than writing music. Not everyone feels that way, but many do. I believe it’s because modern songwriters—and especially songwriting teachers—have mostly fallen out of touch with these techniques that once were taken very seriously and studiously. You can go to almost any music store and find someone who’ll help you practice chords and scales on a guitar, but good luck finding a rhetoric teacher who’ll coach you on writing techniques like cataplexis.
Most songwriters just keep writing song after song, and listen to lots of songs, and just sort of hope they’ll absorb the elements of great writing through osmosis. But I believe any songwriter who makes a serious study of rhetoric will progress much, much faster. Being deliberate and intentional about your own songwriting education is of course going to be more difficult, but also more effective than just drifting along, hoping for the best and leaving your advancement to chance.