Using Poetic Techniques

I saw an exercise, I thought might be fun this month. You won't have to do a complete story. You'll be practicing Alliteration and Assonance.

In case you're not familiar with those terms, here are the definitions:

*Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant sounds of words in close proximity to one another. Examples of alliteration include black and blue, we walk, and time after time.

In some cases, alliteration is used to refer to any repeated consonant sounds, even if they don’t occur at the beginning of words. An example of this would be “blue notebook,” where the b sound is repeated at the beginning of blue and in the middle of notebook.

Alliteration might also be used to describe the repetition of a consonant sound nestled in the middle or even at the end of words. Blueberry, for example, contains alliteration within a single word.

*Assonance is similar to alliteration, except it deals exclusively with vowel sounds. Assonance occurs when accented vowel sounds are repeated in proximity:

'Assonance allows literary writers to create fun phrases.'

In the example phrase above, there are several runs of assonance. The opening 'a' sounds in the words assonance and allows demonstrate one run of assonance. A second run occurs with the 'a' sounds in create and phrases.

Assonance often evokes a sense of rhyme without serving up a direct or technical rhyme. The phrase “fancy pants” is an example of this.

Why practice this? Musicality and repetition enrich any piece of writing. Too often, writers focus on content and not language. The study of poetry, poetry terms, and literary devices like alliteration and assonance reminds us to work on our language, word choice, and sentence structure.

**For your exercise: This is just practice, getting used to the technique. You can write complete sentences or just phrases and they don't need to be related to one another. Write 10 runs using alliteration; write 10 runs using assonance.

Print and mail to 2 partners.