The Art of Scattered Alliteration
How one common device can be used to enhance your writing
When I first learned of alliteration, it wasn’t a linguistic device that interested me much. When my middle school teachers spoke of “whispering winds and willows,” and all of the “seashells Sally sold by the seashore,” I couldn’t help but scoff and roll my eyes. Back then, writing wasn’t a hobby I ever dreamed of exploring.
Each time I heard an example of the device used, it came across as forced and sing-songy. It reeked of everything that the younger me found so objectionable about poetry.
Of course, I’ve heard my fair share of well-employed alliterations in the years since. But in my eyes, it’s a device that’s typically most effective in moderation.
The need for relative moderation doesn’t mean that the device’s calls to action are uncommon. In fact, there’s very little I write these days in which alliteration isn’t an underlying force.
In many types of writing, though, the more commonly recognized brand of alliteration can come across as contrived. Many might not consider op-eds, film reviews, and political pieces as conducive homes for alliterative language at all, for example. In a sober essay about our political moment, blatantly bombastic barrages of Biden-directed “B” words will feel belabored.
But it’s in interspersing tiny alliterations throughout our articles that we instill sentences with a certain punch they might not carry on their own. By limiting them to light inclusions rather than glaring calls for attention, we leave phrases feeling somewhere shy of the more overt uses one would likely associate with more creative contexts.
While not a formally established concept in literature, I think of these more benign inclusions of the device as “partial alliterations,” or “scattered alliterations.” For an example of how they might be applied, consider only the last paragraph. In the final sentence, there were three partial alliterations I used in quick succession, none of which appear to be particularly intentional.
But there’s a phonetic potency I found in the route “phrases feeling somewhere shy… creative contexts,” that I concluded was lost to less alliterative alternatives. Alliteration is a device that can introduce a subtle poetry to our prose.
These less flagrant uses of alliteration often won’t even hinge on words beginning with the same letter. In one political piece I published, I wrote the phrases “confident decrees,” and “disparate systems,” both of which employ the device, but neither of which calls readers’ attention away from the flow of the sentence or the subject matter at hand.
Some of these scattered alliterations can be termed consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds) or assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds). Subtly incorporating them enhances the musicality and rhythm of the language without overwhelming the reader through brute linguistic force.
When used sparingly, alliterations add a layer of sophistication and engagement. They draw attention to key phrases without making the piece too overtly poetic. At best, they help a sentence to rise to something more than the sum of its parts.
In an essay about generative AI’s ability to write, I used the sentence: “The nuance of language is lost.” Though there are a multitude of other ways I could have said that AI fails to recapture the range within our language, I felt that the laconic structure and repetition of “L” sounds drove home a more succinct blow than a few of the other routes I weighed beforehand.
Studies in cognitive psychology suggest that repetition can make information more memorable and impactful. Scattered alliterations leverage this effect by reinforcing certain sounds and ideas, making the text more resonant and easier for readers to recall.
Even in dense technical language, a phrase like “persistent problems” can highlight an issue and add an unobtrusive rhythm to the reading.
Similarly, there are any number of means for getting across the concept of “free and fair elections.” Still, that common term we often hear effectively capitalizes on the gravity embedded in each new election cycle. Phrases like “affordable healthcare access,” “human rights and humanitarian aid,” “equal employment opportunities,” and “digital data protection” each function similarly. The same logic is implicit in many mottos and slogans across our culture.
I can’t remember when this realization first arrived for me. Yet even as a writer who rarely ventures into the realm of poetry, alliteration has become one of the most important components of my craft. For so much of my career up to this point, each sentence was approached merely as a means for getting an idea across. And even while I enjoyed the process, there was an artistic aspect to language that was largely lost on me.
I always knew that sentences were bridges, but I never felt such a dire need to embellish and refine each one I constructed. I never felt that honing and perfecting each truss, arch, and suspension cable was all that important. I didn’t reorder each list I wrote and meticulously consider how each item sounded beside the next. I didn’t choose synonyms for their phonetic intrigue. I didn’t find joy in the way “depict” sounds distinct from “portray,” nor did I derive a smirking satisfaction from the words’ inconsequential swapping of places.
Different types of pieces call for varying levels of freedom. Travel memoirs, creative writing, or linguistic pieces have often felt like my greatest excuses to let loose with alliteration. But depending on the story, dissonance may serve it best. The jarring aspect of words that sound very different from one another could complement a piece in its creative direction. Sometimes alliteration may be best avoided completely.
On more serious subjects, throwing in the sorts of over-the-top sound repetitions English teachers often exemplify will almost invariably come across as feeling trite, unjournalistic, and otherwise out of place.
On a piece about climate change, talking about how “deluges drown desperate landscapes, demonstrating nature’s daunting dichotomy” feels unwelcome. It diminishes the gravity of the subject. In a recounting of a conflict, including a line about how the “sullen soldiers stormed strongholds to showcase their savage strength and steadfast stamina” is gratuitous. It comes across as flowery at another peoples’ expense.
But by sprinkling scattered alliterations throughout our sentences, we strike a balance between poetic flair and readability. We can widen the impact of our words. They can enable us to add depth and emphasis in the places we see fit, and allow us to transform ordinary sentences into more punchy, cogent, and dynamic expressions of thought.
Carefully parsing the sounds of our words in this way can actively broaden the creative process. It can help us to draw artistic value from what might otherwise be a colorless mode of transportation.
This article was originally published on Medium.
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A refreshing, thoroughly researched report. :D
I love using alliteration, especially in humor. I sometimes sneak snippets subtly into my articles.