Ears, by contrast, are portals into which we can control entry (they can be blocked) or volume (they can be muffled), but not the conscious, selective screening of information. If our minds wander as we listen to something read aloud, we can recapture what we missed only if it is recorded. If we are bored and want the story to move on, we must grit our teeth and wait for it to unfold.

Because of these auditory constraints and the linearity of time, people who write for the ear are advised to use short, simple sentences that mimic common speech. Leave the flowery adverbs and subordinate clauses to writing for the eye, they are told.

But what is missed in this division between sense organs and their inputs is that many of us hear language even when we stare at a page or screen. A sentence that is indigestible when spoken runs a good chance of not being palatable when read.

Which means that we should always write for the ear, even when no one is listening.

I learned this in an odd way—by working as an editor at a graphic design magazine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, design was steeped in the postmodern movement, which was fueled by the revolution in desktop computing technology, and it was often not pretty.

Once graphic designers got their hands on software that allowed them to manipulate type, they went crazy. Often, their layered typographic experiments were aesthetically groundbreaking works of art, but just as frequently—I would go so far as to say almost always—they were nightmares of blasted legibility.

Poster headlines and publication display type would be letterspaced to such a width that the eye had to inhale and leap like a hurdler to traverse the echoey distances within single words. Lowercase and uppercase were indiscriminately mingled, so that characters that shouted and characters that whispered were joined in a single cacophonous collective.

Designers frequently defended these experiments by stating that their aim was to stoke curiosity—to draw readers closer to the page or poster by extending what the designer optimistically imagined was an irresistible compulsion to decipher it. Zuzana Licko, the Czech-born cofounder of the California-based design magazine Émigré, which made gorgeous, groundbreaking demonstrations of computer-manipulated type in that era, defended the legibility, or lack thereof, of her experiments by stating, “People read best what they read most.” Which is to say that you can’t completely efface literary appeal even if something is very, very hard to read, just as you can’t discourage people who are determined to scale Mount Everest simply by subjecting them to altitude sickness and frostbite.

It was these intrepid designers who taught me how noisy non–spoken language could be, and their lessons persisted even when postmodernism went belly-up and texts calmed down and got easier to read. I began to understand why so many great musicians (Joni Mitchell, David Byrne, Kim Gordon) had started as visual artists, and why so many designers were musical to their bones.

Art Chantry, for example, a designer associated with Seattle’s post-punk independent music scene to the extent that the Seattle Times anointed him the “godfather of grunge,” translated sound waves into degraded type and explosive color. He did this so deftly that his posters and record covers looked as if they spontaneously erupted, even as they communicated every detail you wanted to know about a band or performance.

It is no accident that Art Chantry was—and remains—a mesmerizing writer and talker. Consciously or unconsciously, he understands that the ear is hardwired to the eye. We don’t just see what we hear, conjuring visions to illustrate words. We hear what we see, sensorially entering the texts that lie before us, or backing away if they don’t hook our attention.

Possibly because I’m a writer, I often think in full sentences. I compose things in my head. Words rattle around in there like music. Sometimes I hit on a groove before I’m conscious of the words it will carry. I don’t believe I’m alone in that. My husband is also a writer, and sometimes he just stands there with a funny look on his face. “I’m working on a story,” he explains.