Assonance and Alliteration (cont.)

Sometimes the repeated sounds just flow out as you're writing a poem, and that's great. But if they don't, that's ok. This is one of the easiest, fun ways to revise a poem.

Here are two lines from the first draft of a poem I was working on.

My fingers clumsy as a claw
Lines tossed out like scattered straw

The lines are ok. There's nothing wrong with them. But I wanted them to be a little punchier, have a little more zip.

I looked at the first line, and I kind of liked the way the "a" in "as" reminds me of a scratchy sound, like a sore throat, kind of. And scratchy is definitely the theme of this whole poem. So I played with words to find ones that meant the same thing as the words I had already used. I came up with "hand" instead of fingers. Close enough in meaning, and the same "a" sound. And for a bonus, since "hand" has only one syllable, I could add another "as," so my line became:

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