Thursday Tip: Repeating a sound

The last Tips talked about two elegant repetitions—repeating a word and repeating a root. This week’s adds a third, one more often associated with poems than with prose.

Alliteration, repeating a consonant sound at the beginning of two or more words in a sentence, can add poetry to the ordinary. It usually combines words with the same first letter. Like all repetition, it strengthens the link between words and the attention to those words. (Indeed, it preceded rhyming in Middle English.)

Consider this example from an old issue of The Economist:

Fatter capital ratios, fancy risk management systems, and faster diversification: all of these things are undoubtedly creating a fitter banking system.

Note that the repetition need not involve consecutive words. Here, it binds the sentence by linking the attributes of the banking system. To be parallel, fancy might have been fancier.

Another example, this one from The Economist’s “Flooding the Grand Canyon”:

Those glorious inundations moved massive quantities of sediment through the Grand Canyon, wiping the slate dirty, and making a muddy mess of silt and muck that would make modern river rafters cringe.

This use is less ordered than the first, but the alliteration still brings poetry, leaving the reader reveling in the consecutive m’s.

But use alliteration sparingly—it can be annoying if overused. The “Flooding” passage, for example, could easily have gone too far:

Those glorious inundations moved massive quantities of sediment through the Grand Canyon, wiping the slate dirty, and making a muddy mess of mire and muck that would make modern mariners misdoubt.

The alliteration now overwhelms the sentence’s point.