Like assonance, alliteration can have a sing-songy affect, but rather than be soothing I find that alliteration tends to be the opposite – it wakes us up, grabs our attention, and makes the words pop. When these sounds happen to be vowels, assonance and alliteration overlap. AlliterationĪlliteration is a similar and probably more recognized device, which involves stringing together similar sounds at the beginnings of words. “And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the gl ade in a fr ail agony of gr ace she tr ailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage.” Let’s l ight a f ire betw een th ese tr ees. I find that assonance also tends to have a hypnotic, soothing, and sometimes even ghostly effect – perhaps because vowel sounds tend to be longer and involve more breath than consonants, and as such drawing attention to these sounds has a way of emphasizing the more spacious elements of words. a rhyme that doesn’t fall at the end of a line or phrase) and can give your prose a musical quality. This creates a sense of “internal rhyme” (i.e. AssonanceĪssonance is the repetition of vowel sounds within a phrase or sentence. The three sound elements I want to discuss are assonance, alliteration, and the qualities evoked by different letters. However, you don’t have to actually read aloud in order to appreciate the effects of sound in writing – when you’re intimately familiar with a language you can (and involuntarily do) echo its spoken properties in your head as you read silently. Techniques that use sound play with the literal sounds of the words when spoken aloud. I’m going to divide the techniques we look at into two (completely unofficial) categories: techniques that use sound, and techniques that use rhythm. What’s incredible is how quickly language skills become internalized once you learn to pay attention them, and how over time conscious and attentive reading can make you a better writer almost by osmosis. This is in no way meant to be a comprehensive guide, but hopefully it will help you notice how language is used in the books, stories, and essays you read, which can in turn help you use language more consciously and creatively in your own writing. Over the next couple of posts, I want to discuss a few of these techniques in a bit more detail, and introduce you to some ways that writers can use the aesthetic properties of language to affect their readers’ experience. Learning about techniques commonly used in poetry has a great influence on my creative life in the years since, even as I switched to other literary disciplines. In it, I discussed a number of literary devices that I first encountered during my undergraduate studies in poetry writing. Recently, we published a post on how studying poetry can make you a better prose writer. comes across even when you're reading in silence.
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