Best of Week: Controlling Stream-of-Consciousness

People have trouble saying what they mean. Even if the sentences one composes are perfectly coherent, and seem to convey one's thoughts, it is still possible for another to misinterpret what seems to the writer a very obvious statement.
          This problem becomes increasingly relevant when attempting to write in stream-of-consciousness. The human mind does not conform to any sort of rules, nor does it operate with any sort of predictable pattern. It is understandable, then, that stream-of-consciousness can be exceedingly difficult to convey and thus difficult to follow.
          Stream-of-consciousness is prevalent in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, but the author does a spectacular job of keeping it simple and clean. After reading through one particular discourse, I went back to read it again, not out of confusion but out of fascination that a single-sentence paragraph could be made interesting and, more importantly, totally comprehensible. This passage captured my attention and held it until the next day, when a classmate (I regret that I don't remember who) finally revealed the key element to the clarity of the writing.

Structure, punctuation and word choice can be used to control the speed and rhythm of the reader's thoughts.

           We discussed this point for a while longer, but it was not until I later looked back at the passage which we had used as an example:

"Better is it," she thought, "to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better to be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can fully enjoy the most exalted raptures of the human spirit, which are," she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, "contemplation, solitude, love."

           The passage causes the reader's mind to speed up by gradually shifting from semicolons to commas to list thoughts, and by increasing the number of monosyllabic words near the end. What's most interesting about this is that, by adding, removing or shifting the location of punctuation and breaks in the sentence, you can completely change the way the text is processed. For instance, by removing the break beginning with 'she said aloud...', you remove the emphasis on the last three words (which hold much significance) and cause the reader to speed through the end of the sentence, thus placing much more importance in the beginning of the sentence.
           In this way it would also be possible to place an exaggerated amount of emphasis at the end of the sentence, namely by replacing the semicolons with commas and omitting the repetitions of the word 'better.' This causes the beginning of the sentence to flow faster, and essentially pour all the interest into the last three words.