Prose has a sound, and ignoring it weakens the story

Le Guin insists that narrative prose is meant to be heard, not just decoded on the page, and that rhythm, cadence, and the physical texture of words shape a reader's experience as much as plot does. She points to writers like Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston, whose dialect and rhythm carry emotional weight that a purely visual reading would miss. A "good writer," she says, has a mind's ear — an internal sense of how a sentence lands when spoken aloud.

Her central exercise asks writers to compose a passage explicitly meant to be read aloud, using alliteration, onomatopoeia, and deliberate rhythm, without worrying about rhyme or meter. The goal isn't ornamental prettiness; it's training the ear to notice when language drags, clatters, or flows, since pacing and sound directly affect how urgently or calmly a reader experiences a scene.

Takeaway: read your own sentences aloud before trusting they work — your ear catches what your eye skims past.