smart moves for style and clarity

How often have you said about a piece of writing that it “sounds right” or “doesn’t sound right”? It’s a telling description because language is all about sound — so much so that we are not aware of how we respond nonstop to nuances of sound.
 

Strong writers use sound tactics to add polish and reinforce meaning. I bet that if you examine a passage of writing that you admire, you would find the writer manipulating elements of sound, particularly at moments where the writer wanted stress.
 

One endlessly effective sound tactic is alliteration, which is simply the repetition of similar sounds. For our purposes here, this repetition can include vowels, consonants and stressed syllables. Alliteration is everywhere, occurring in all kinds of common expressions; in fact, the expressions became common because of their alliteration:
 

                March madness                              other fish to fry
                bang for the buck                            sin city
                lounge lizard                                     crazy cat
                dirty deed                                           loss of life           
                fast food                                            a meeting of the minds
                put into practice                               no love lost
                fat farm                                              fashion disaster
                

Alliteration tends to be most conspicuous at the beginning of words but it can also occur in the middle, end or a combination of these slots. Unlike rhyme, in which words share an identical vowel, alliteration of vowels involves similar rather than identical sounds. Fat farm is alliterative (the fconsonant and the a vowel in the initial position of both words) but brain drain is a rhyme.
 

Alliteration is amplified when words share not only similar sounds but also similarly stressed syllables. Alan Greesnspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, coined the words irrational exuberance to describe a white-hot stock market. While the words have a similar initial vowel, more catchy is the similar pattern of stresses, with each word having stress on the second of four syllables (i-rash-o-nal  ig-zoo-be-rance). When someone refers to courage as intestinal fortitude, both the alliterative t sounds and the similar stresses draw extra attention.
 

Like rhyme, alliteration can be very catchy; it’s the stuff of many everyday expressions, clichés, newspaper headlines and advertising jingles — all evidence of our inexhaustible attraction to repetition. It’s the reason why the expression is the birds and the bees not the birds and the wasps, and rhyme or reason not rhyme or explanation.
 

Alliteration serves well at points of emphasis — headlines, titles, introductions and the beginnings and endings of paragraphs. A trademark of Variety, the magazine of Hollywood show biz, is huge doses of alliteration in headlines, part of a slangy style that reaches playfully pandemic proportions:
 

                FX gets its fix of Fox pix

                DVD biz hammered by high-def headaches
 

That kind of alliteration would be out of place in a legal brief, but it’s fine for Variety — and for Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose, who write things like Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Still, a writer can find opportunities to put alliterative excess to work in more formal styles. You might use a string of alliterative modifiers to describe an arrogant professor or a foolish person:
 

                The professor was preposterously pompous and pretentious.
                She fumbled, she fretted, she frittered, and finally she failed.
 

Vice President Spiro Agnew was known for dismissing his critics with extreme alliteration designed to make them seem ridiculous — “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “pusillanimous pussyfooters.”
 

But who, you say, would talk like this in a serious situation? In a  speech President Warren Harding splattered his audience with a plethora of pointless p sounds:
 

                Progression is not proclamation nor palaver. It is not pretense nor play

                on prejudice. It is not personal pronouns, nor perennial pronouncement.

                It is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought, nor a promise

                proposed.
 

Like a bad poet who chooses words that rhyme regardless of meaning, Harding parades his alliterative pairs but tramples meaning underfoot. Jesse Jackson overexerted alliteration and rhyme in this passage:
 

                Today's students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If

                they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it

                is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.
 

In an inaugural address Barack Obama dialed back the alliteration of the s sound to a more sane level:
 

                We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of

                us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our

                forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it

                guided all those men and women, sung and unsung…
 

Sometimes, just a dab will do.   Ω

Want to comment on this post?  Click here.

Related article  To highlight strong modifiers while revising, read Make the Most of Modifiers.