What is alliteration, and what are the other sound devices in writing?

Alliteration is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound in nearby words. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Note that it is about sound, not spelling. Kind cat alliterates; church chorus does not, because ch and k are different sounds despite the shared letters.

Several related devices work on sound rather than meaning:

Assonance repeats vowel sounds within words. The rain in Spain. It creates a softer internal echo than alliteration.

Consonance repeats consonant sounds anywhere in the word, not just at the start. Pitter patter, blank and think.

Sibilance is a specific kind of consonance using s, sh and z sounds. It is often used to suggest whispering, menace or the sea.

Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it names — buzz, crash, hiss, murmur.

Cacophony and euphony describe the overall effect: harsh, clashing sounds against smooth, pleasant ones. Writers use hard consonants for discomfort and long vowels and soft consonants for calm.

These are not merely decorative. Sound patterning makes text more memorable, which is why it dominates advertising slogans, headlines, band names and brand names. It also slows a reader down, since repeated sounds draw attention to the words themselves.

The risk is overuse. In prose, more than two or three alliterating words together tips from pleasing into distracting, and reads as trying too hard.

Rhyme is the most familiar sound device, and in prose it is almost always accidental and worth removing — an unintended internal rhyme jars.

One caution specific to business writing: alliteration in headings and taglines is so common that it has become a cliché of its own — proven performance, solutions that scale. It draws attention to the phrasing rather than the point, which is the opposite of what most business copy needs.