The worst has come to pass — someone complimented David’s prose and he’s decided to expound on theories of writing craft! Roll up the carpet because once a literary tool starts talking about his made up literary devices then it’s really all over but the crying… but since you’re already here and you look like the writerly sort — that’s really not meant to be an insult, I swear — why don’t you listen to the old prose poseur and let us know what you think?
Enjoy!
Loose Alliteration
When writing there are many poetic techniques you can employ — assonance, rhyme, alliteration, etc. — all of which are worth experimenting with to define your style, but I've found one method to be particularly easy to apply without feeling overly forced. I call this quick and dirty trick Loose Alliteration and I hope to explain its theory and practice in a way that is easy for you to immediately experiment with in your own editing. I say editing because this is not something to concern yourself while initially drafting anything, but simply a tool to bring out during the polish phase of a project.
For anything below to make a lick of sense though, you need to recognize that language is first and foremost a spoken phenomenon and writing is only our imperfect attempt to capture its immense complexity. What you write will be received by your reader as a sequence of alphabetical symbols translated into their brain as a sort of spoken word drummed out within their head. This is why you can feel the beauty of a well written sentence read in silence.
So open wide, and let’s dive into mouth structure.
Theory
This technique occurred to me while reading “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” in which the author, David W. Anthony, dives into the drivers of linguistic drift over time. Read his book for a more complete analysis but one of the primary factors he points to that led the ancient Indo-European language to evolve into its many, many, daughter languages is the concept I summarize as 'tongue-side preference' — that is the idea that that since making sounds with our mouth is a physical act that requires specific tongue/mouth placement, then it is naturally difficult to make two sounds that require radically different tongue/mouth placement in quick succession.
Try it right now for yourself (make sure nobody is watching first, of course) by making an “S” sound immediately slurred into an “L” sound. Do it a few times and feel that awkward lump at the top of your throat as you try transitioning.
Next do the same with an “S” sound slurring into a “D”. You’ll notice it’s an effortless transition in contrast, almost pleasant feeling.
A classic example of how this impacts us in linguistic drift is the word ‘athlete’ which in some American vernacular is pronounced as “ath-ah-lete” due precisely to this challenge in transitioning tongue placement from the frontal “Th” to the rearmost “L”. This tongue-tripping and insertion of an additional vowel (a phenomenon called epenthesis) is a predictable part of how languages evolve exactly because it is a biological constant.
If your mouth isn’t feeling tired yet, you can watch this video of the speaking human mouth in action to see just how much is going on to produce a sentence.
The conclusion I draw from this knowledge is that an aspect of good prose is a smooth sense of ‘mouth-feel’ which can be aided by minimizing tongue-tripping (even just mental tongue-tripping for the silent reader). This can certainly be done to some extent at the word choice/syllable level, but at the sentence level the short-hand method I have developed to avoid tongue-tripping is a system of Loose Alliteration based on the first consonant sound of words.
Application
So with the assumption that good mouth-feel can come from minimizing tongue transitions between the front and back of the mouth, I have divided the consonant sounds into two categories based on how it feels when I say them:
Say each sound aloud and see if you can feel the difference in the locus of vibration in your mouth. Keep in mind that this is just a layman’s gross simplification of an entire field of study in phonetics that you could lose yourself in for years. Technically this should probably be written using phonetic symbols, however I find this format much more usable.
Note that the raw letters you write on the page can’t always be trusted since we are discussing sounds (remember that all language is primarily spoken) so ‘Sh’ and ‘Th’ are their own beasts. And ‘C’ really has no sound of its own and acts merely as a placeholder for a ‘K’ or ‘S’ sound.
We all know that Alliteration is a pleasant poetic device of repeating the same initial consonant sound — for example “silent stars” or “crowded corpulent clowns”. So then Loose Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds which are made on the same tongue-side. This could either be several Front-Tongue consonant sounds or several Back-Tongue consonant sounds in a sequence based on the table above. An example to read aloud:
“It was a Golden Locket of Common Make…”
The bolded and capitalized consonant sounds above are all what I would consider Back-Tongue sounds, when said in sequence they are Loosely Alliterative even though none of them are the exact same sound.
As you can see, I ignore bridge words and words with an initial vowel sound such as “of”, “a”, “the”, “and”, “or”. My reasoning is that the pronunciation of such words is almost never as emphasized as the nouns, verbs, and adjectives that are the cornerstones of a sentence tonally. Additionally in the case of vowels, they are produced with no air constriction whereas pronouncing consonants involves a partial or total constriction of air flow which is a more significant movement (vowels are viewed as neutral in terms of tongue-side).
Note that a sentence can alternate between Front-Tongue and Back-Tongue Loose Alliteration without issue. Let’s read aloud from an expanded version of that same example:
“It was a Golden Locket of Common Make, but Eliza Treasured it with a Fearsome Devotion all the Same.”
Here the sentence is Back-Tongue Loosely Alliterative before the comma, then Front-Tongue Loosely Alliterative for the rest of the sentence.
Closing Thoughts
As mentioned, this is not at all something to belabor in editing — seek clarity first and foremost in your writing. Sometimes the clearest and most concise way of stating something simply does not align with the idea of Loose Alliteration, in fact some topics or genres of writing would be actively harmed by the more poetic/semi-musical style its heavy use can bring. However I find it to be a great tool when you’re wrestling on which word to use or to trying to identify why a particular line does not have great flow.
Try it next time you edit a project, and I hope it helps you find that perfect flow.
Loved this article! You are well on your way to becoming a poet! The technical term you are looking for, and that might aid in future research, is the word "phoneme." There are 44 in the English language and are actually mapped in the human mouth. Here is my favorite guide to their usage that has the benefit of being colorful as well.
https://kottke.org/19/03/a-phonetic-map-of-the-human-mouth