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#6 in an occasional series -- your challenge is to use it at least once today.
Alliteration and Assonance
Literally, something like "together-letteredness" / "sounding together".
Alliteration is the use of the same sound (usually a consonant) at the beginning of successive words, eg. "cool, calm and collected". The related Assonance is the use of sounds resembling each other (usually vowels) within successive words, eg. "how now, brown cow". To confuse things slightly, if you use repeated consonant sounds but not at the beginning of the words, this is assonance rather than alliteration, eg. "he was killed, chilled, cold" repeats the "-ld" sound assonantly.
The idea is to get a compelling rhetorical power from the audile effect of the repetition. [Is 'audile' a real word? -- doesn't look quite right...] It has the advantage of also working in print to some extent -- those repeated "c"s in the first example definitely catch the eye. Unlike most of these devices, you can even use it subtly in conversation without sounding too pretentious!
You will have noticed that these two devices take their names frm Latin rather than from Greek, as all the others hitherto. Why this should be, I don't know -- maybe this technique doesn't work as well in Greek for some reason, so they never bothered naming it.
Alliteration and Assonance
Literally, something like "together-letteredness" / "sounding together".Alliteration is the use of the same sound (usually a consonant) at the beginning of successive words, eg. "cool, calm and collected". The related Assonance is the use of sounds resembling each other (usually vowels) within successive words, eg. "how now, brown cow". To confuse things slightly, if you use repeated consonant sounds but not at the beginning of the words, this is assonance rather than alliteration, eg. "he was killed, chilled, cold" repeats the "-ld" sound assonantly.
The idea is to get a compelling rhetorical power from the audile effect of the repetition. [Is 'audile' a real word? -- doesn't look quite right...] It has the advantage of also working in print to some extent -- those repeated "c"s in the first example definitely catch the eye. Unlike most of these devices, you can even use it subtly in conversation without sounding too pretentious!
You will have noticed that these two devices take their names frm Latin rather than from Greek, as all the others hitherto. Why this should be, I don't know -- maybe this technique doesn't work as well in Greek for some reason, so they never bothered naming it.
