Alliteration, Consonance, Assonance

1. Alliteration, Consonance, Assonance ISAT Prep

2. Alliteration, assonance, and consonance • Poets, authors, and song writers use these as tools. • Educated people recognize and appreciate these. • These have to do with repeating word sounds.

3. Alliteration • Repetition of initial consonant sound. Example Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

4. Consonance • Repetition of a consonant sound that is not at the beginning of the word. Example All mammels named Sam are clammy.

5. Assonance • Repetition of vowel sound. Examples • “That solitude which suits abstruser musings” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge • “Hear the mellow wedding bells.” — Edgar Allen Poe

6. Review • Alliteration is repetition of initial consonant sound. • Consonance is repetition of consonant sound at the middle or end of words. • Assonance is repetition of vowel sounds.

7. Assignment • Identify three examples of alliteration, consonance, and assonance in Poe’s “The Raven.” • include the line # • you may use the same line more than once to identify separate sound devices

8. Possible Answers • alliteration “Once, while, weak, weary” (1) “nodded, nearly napping” (3) “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” (20) • consonance “uncertain, rustling” (12) “Raven, ‘Nevermore’” (48) “rapping-rapping” (4)  • assonance “purple curtain” (13) “unbroken, no token” (26) “laiden , Aiden” (93)

9. In more modern verse, stressed assonance is frequently used as a rhythmic device in modern rap. • "Their pens and pads I snatch 'cause I've had it / I'm not an addict, fiending for static / I see their tape recorder and I grab it / No, you can't have it back, silly rabbit". --Public Enemy • “I bomb atomically—Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses can't define how I be droppin' these mockeries.” –Wu-Tang Clan • “Dead in the middle of little Italy, little did we know that we riddled two middle men who didn't do diddily.“ --Big Pun --Wikipedia.org