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Signaling significance, cadence authenticates your voice.
A cadence is a pause that meaningfully punctuates the flow of music. Similarly, in our writing, cadences are stress points, moments where syntax and substance team up to convey special meaning. Cadences are the drumbeats that sound through our prose signalling significance to readers, telling them how the writing is to be read. Because cadences play so primary a role in creating and authenticating a writer's "voice," they're especially crucial to anyone who spends full workdays trying to change other people's minds.
To illustrate the way cadences can affect the way we hear or read words, I will focus here on the familiar "I have a dream" sequence in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech during the 1963 March on Washington. His initial two sentences set up what is to follow:
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be...