קצב

A page can hold four minutes or forty years

• Pacing 节奏 is the manipulation of time in a text.
• Not the speed of events, but what the text does with the time they take.
• So pacing is always a choice, and it can be pointed at on the page.

A text can spend four pages on one minute and one sentence on a decade; the clock has lodged a complaint.

Six contributing factors

• The CED lists them: arrangement of details, frequency of events, narrative structures, syntax, the tempo or speed at which events occur, and shifts in tense and chronology.
• Four of the six are things you can quote directly.
• So an analysis of pacing never has to be impressionistic.

Syntax is a pacing device

• This is the factor students never think of, and the easiest to quote.
• Long accumulating sentences slow a passage; a run of short ones speeds it.
• A single short sentence after three long ones stops the reader completely — and that stop is a pacing effect.

Frequency and tempo are different

• Frequency of events: how many things happen per page.
• Tempo: how fast each one is allowed to unfold.
• A page with one event told slowly and a page with six told quickly can cover the same hour.

A pacing pass

• Find the fastest passage and the slowest, and quote a sentence from each.
• Name which of the six factors produced the difference.
• The next subtopic asks what the pacing does to the reader — this one asks how it is made.