Assonance & Alliteration | Week 5, Lesson 3 | Grade 9

 Assonance and Alliteration are two features of language that writers, especially poets, use. 

They are meant to engage a reader’s auditory (i.e, listening) skills while also making the writing they are used in sound musical and fun to read. Assonance and Alliteration are mainly different in terms of what letter type is repeated and where. Since poetry and prose use them heavily, they can be a little hard to distinguish to most people.

What is Alliteration?

Alliteration is a literary style that deals with the repetition of similar or identical consonant sounds. (All letters of the Alphabet, other than Vowels, are consonants)
It makes a line fun to read and usually repeats the consonant sounds in a word, usually in the beginning those words, but may occur at any point. You may be familiar with this famous example of Alliteration from the old tongue-twister "Peter the piper". 


E.g #1 - "Peter piper picked a pepper; put it in a pepper pot", is the Guyanese version of it. The alliteration in this sentence is based on a repetition of the "P" sound.

What is Assonance?

Assonance (or vowel rhyme) is the repetition of a vowel sound (a,e,i,o,u / y) in a sentence to create an internal rhyme. The sound does not always have to be at the start of a word. For example:

E.g #2 - The moon rose over an open field:

Here the flat "O" sound is repeated 3 times. As you know vowels are pronounced in more than one way. There are usually 2 ways to pronounce a vowel - the round sound and the flat sound. The "oo" in moon is the result of two round "O" sounds being blended together (it would sound a little like a "U").

E.g #3 - The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains.

Did you know your accent slightly changes the way words are pronounced? Assonance is based on the rhyming vowel sounds between two or more words and different people pronounce those sounds differently. 

Take the word "Dam" - which means a small, unpaved road. Americans would pronounce it as "DaAm" stretching out the flat "A" sounds; in Britain however, they would most likely say "DAom", making the word sound more rounded and soft.


N.B - Work your exercise at the bottom of page 7 of your most recent handout. Here is a picture of the exercise.

Sources

Alliteration

Assonance

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