Saturday, May 29, 2010

Writing Strategy: Sound Repetition

Sound repetition is a very powerful stylistic strategy to use in your writing! There are lots of different ways you can use sound repetition.

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds. Consonance is the repetition of a consonant sound in a series of words. Alliteration is a specific form of consonance when the repeated consonant sound is found at the beginning of the words.

Rhyme is a form of sound repetition which you can find in medieval Latin, but which is quite uncommon in classical Latin. Near rhyme can be based on similar but not identical sound repetition.

In this list - primus - sanctus - arripere - aetas - ex - I knew that I wanted to create opposing pairs for the adjectives primus and sanctus. For the many possible words that are the opposite of primus, I chose pessimus, because of the alliteration. For sanctus, I chose scelestus as the opposite, again because of the alliteration. I really like the idea of words that are opposite in meaning sharing a similarity in sound. You can see the results here if you are curious.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

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