Is a rhyming card too childish for a grown-up friend?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nRhyme is not the problem, generic rhyme is. What makes a verse read like a children’s card is that any name at all could be dropped into it: good wishes, good health, another year around the sun. Four lines that mention the book she never gave back, the winter she drove you to the airport before dawn, or the band you both pretend you never liked cannot be mistaken for something printed by the thousand. Keep it short, keep the rhyme clean rather than clever, and let the last line fall into plain speech instead of a flourish. A verse that ends with you’re the best of us does more work than one that ends on a sunset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do you tell her you did not write the verse yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNobody expects a card to contain original work, and a rhyme copied out in your own hand is an entirely normal thing to give somebody. If it comes up, say so plainly: I found this and it said what I wanted to say is a good sentence, and it is often the one she repeats afterwards. What does not go down well is performing authorship \u2014 the coy hint that you were up half the night composing. If you want a piece of it to be genuinely yours, put one detail that only the two of you would follow into a line that carries no rhyme, and leave the rest as it stands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Does a verse survive in a text message, or does it need to be on paper?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt survives, but only if you set it up. Pasted into a chat window a rhyme arrives as one long grey block, because the line breaks are the first thing to disappear, and four lines run together read as an odd sentence rather than as verse. Send it as a message of its own with nothing before or after it, and put the ordinary greeting in a separate one \u2014 a verse needs a little quiet around it. Photographing a handwritten copy and sending the picture works even better and tends to get saved. What fails is a rhyme buried three paragraphs down a long message, where it reads as filler instead of the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do you sign a verse, and what goes underneath it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nSign it the way you sign anything else: your name, plain. A verse needs no closing formula stacked on top of it \u2014 love and your name is plenty, and both names on a card from a household. What is worth adding underneath is one line of ordinary prose: when you will next see her, what the plan is, what you still owe her. The contrast works in your favour. The rhyme carries the feeling and the sentence underneath carries the practical part, so she gets both without either sounding overdone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her year was rough. Does a rhyme make light of it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOnly if it skips the year. A verse that goes straight to cake and candles after twelve hard months reads as though you had not been paying attention. Name it once, briefly and without diagnosis \u2014 it wasn’t your best year is enough \u2014 and then move to something concrete you are offering: an evening, a chair at your table, a share of whatever she is carrying. Skip the silver lining altogether; it is the fastest way to make someone feel unseen. And keep the verse shorter than usual. Four lines that acknowledge the year and stop are easier to receive than sixteen that work their way toward hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A rhymed birthday card is a small high-wire act. Get it right and it stays in her kitchen drawer for years; get it wrong and it reads like something printed by the thousand, with a stock teacup on the front. The difference is almost never the rhyme itself \u2014 it is whether a single line […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":5440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3639],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5439","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5443,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5439\/revisions\/5443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5439"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5439"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5439"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ottawa.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}