Notice the Assonance Balance in this Sentence

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Colin. I’m from Los Angeles.

Hi, Colin. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

I had a question about assonance.

I have a friend who she’s like a great writer and she also has like a following on Twitter, you know,

And she was telling me that she can like predict which tweets of hers will go viral because they usually have assonance.

She was trying to explain to me what it was because I was very struggling with it.

And we were playing a game where we would say word combinations back and forth that had assonance in them.

But I kept just rhyming words.

So, like, I couldn’t, I just can’t wrap my head around assonance exactly.

I was wondering if you could help me.

Colin, what was she tweeting about?

What was the topic?

Yeah, absolutely.

I could read one of the tweets that went viral.

Sure.

So the tweet’s from Helen Kingston, and she’s at Kingston Writes.

And she says, men’s midlife crises are intensely boring.

They just get an expensive bike and marry a 30-year-old version of the same wife, whereas women do cool stuff like open owl cafes, retrain as beekeepers, and get PhDs in necromancy.

I don’t want to go to an owl cafe.

Yeah, that’s a good tweet.

She has a lot of followers, I guess, though, too.

Yeah, and it went viral, she said, because at the end, the words PhD in necromancy was like—I mean, she said that the ones that have accidents have a better chance of going viral.

Not that it’s like there’s a formula for it, but she just noticed that that happens.

Right.

She’s talking about the internal vowel sounds of a lot of those words.

So assonance.

Let’s just make sure everyone understands the word that we’re saying here.

It’s A-S-S-O-N-A-N-C-E, assonance.

And it can be like a rhyme, but assonance, like Martha says, is the internal vowels being the same,

Even if the consonants surrounding them are different.

So what’s some good assonance, Martha?

Do you have some examples here?

You know, one of my favorite poems that I had to learn in junior high was The High Women by Alfred Noyes.

You know, it talks about the road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor.

And the high women came riding, riding, riding.

The high women came riding up to the old end door.

And it’s got some alliteration in there.

A lot of words that start with the same letter, but it’s also got those, the I sound of the

High women came riding, riding, riding up to the old indoor, which rhymes with more.

So it’s almost, Colin, it’s almost like, asmuth is almost like an imperfect rhyme. So the vowels,

The vowels of this can be the same or similar. They don’t even have to be exactly the same,

But the consonants are different.

I see.

Yeah.

So, yes, I get that.

That poem’s beautiful.

There’s a line from Emily Dickinson that has some assonance in it.

Dear to the moss, known by the knoll, next to the robin in every human soul.

So, known by the knoll is assonance, but knoll and soul is a rhyme,

Because the all at the end rhymes.

Known and knoll.

They start with the same sound, the same, you know, no, but they don’t end with the same sound.

So that’s assonance.

And that’s the difference.

It’s the vowel.

But it’s funny that she gets so many likes.

I would suspect that she has a writing community that is sensitive to that.

And even whether they know it or not, that they’re particularly aware of it.

Perhaps they’re sub-vocalizing as they’re reading and they’re hearing that assonance as the tweets are passing through their eyes and their brains.

It’s so interesting because it just sounds pleasant to the ear, like when I was reading it.

And I think the main one is PhD in necromancy.

Sounds musical. It has like a musical element to it.

Yes, I was going to say, you mentioned the musical element, and I was wondering if she reads her tweets aloud before she sends them out.

That’s a writer’s trick, isn’t it, Martha, to be a better writer?

Oh, it is. Absolutely. I mean, I once rewrote a whole book because I started to read it aloud and I just didn’t like how it sounded because it’s so different.

Just reading the words on the page silently. It’s so different. You wouldn’t think it would be that different, but it really is when you vocalize those sounds.

I love that you have those people in your life who are willing to, that you can fool around with language in that way.

And they’re willing to entertain this just whole notion of like, let’s just goof around with assonance.

That’s a lovely friend indeed.

Yeah.

Well, I appreciate it.

All right.

Take care, Colin.

Thanks, Colin.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

What are your thoughts, comments, and idea about language and words and old sayings and some slang you might have heard or a book that you loved or a story that you’re convinced is the best one ever?

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