Also amongst the things I discovered, cleaning out my office, a book called Web Type Expert by Tom Arah (Friedman/Fairfax, 2003). Because I didn’t finish reading this book back when I bought it, I thought perhaps the time had come to do so. So it is I found this statement on page 26:
So what is the ideal length [of line]? In a newspaper or magazine text column, the rule of thumb is that each line should contain around 50 to 55 characters, which makes around 10 words on average. That’s the ideal line length for the most comfortable reading .. .
This struck me as interestingly close to Dr.Chafe’s findings that people set to repunctuate text from sources as various as Henry James and advertising copy added punctuation at a mean of 9.6 words for readers in their 20s and 10.6 those in their 60s. So one might infer that ten-ish words is the norm for the eye to take in.
In comparison, a line of iambic pentameter, though it runs to about ten syllables, will seldom contain ten words. If we look at ten random lines of Paradise Lost, for example, lines from the reputed master of iambic pentameter, the average is 7.9 words per line.
Where does that put us? Halfway between the spoken average of 5-ish words and the written average of ten.
Given, however, that most iambic pentameter has a caesura after either foot two or foot three, then the intonation units for poetry are particularly short.
Somewhere I have read that iambic tetrameter, the bouncing 4-beat rhythm of nursery rhyme, is actually more natural to English speech.
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
Oh how I wish he’d go away.
The invisible man averages 6.5 words per line. Very close to the conversational norm of 5-6 words per intonation unit.
Once you get past 4 beats, your line starts breaking up with that caesura. Ive talked about the pentameter line. A six-beat line will break into two trimeters and a seven-beat line sounds like a ballad stanza of a four-beat line followed by a three-beat:
It is an ancient mariner
and he stoppeth one of three.
Of course, free verse doesn’t have a meter problem, but it might nevetheless be good to contemplate how the reader is going to read your line.
