What;'s your beef with adverbs, Janet?

It is interesting to read the section from Burroway's "Writing Fiction" entitled "Prose Rhthym." Perhaps the most interesting quality of this portion of the text is the author's apparent ambivalence towards rhythm in prose writing.

Burroway states, in reference to prose writing, that "on the whole the rhythm is all right if it isn't clearly wrong." She states that rhythm can be wrong if the "cadence contradicts the meaning" - she provides an example of a piece where the rhythm doesn't work, a piece depicting a lazy day on a river. The selection contains several short sentences, which feel rather abrupt. She goes on to rearrange the piece, using longer sentences to extend the cadence and give the work a more leisurely rhythm (which works better with the content of the selection), but then goes on to add that there is "nothing very striking about the rhythm of this version." My problem with her "if it's not broke, don't fix it" attitude is that, for many people, rhythm is something that is not inherent. Like many other elements of writing, it is an aspect which must be practiced. Burroway comments at the beginnging of this section that novelists and short-story writers do not need to concern themselves with the relationship between sense and sound in the same way that poets do. While, I would agree that rhythm is one of the most primary elements in poetry, I would argue that its importance in effective prose writing is not something that should be disregarded. Certainly, the idea that rhythm is something that only poets need to concern themselves with seems highly problematic. There are several prose writers I can think of who would appear to be extremely concerned with rhythm. Their awareness of rhythm informs their literary works in very noticeable and striking ways and is a large component of their personal style of writing.