The Power of Similar Sounds in Blog Post Titles

The contributing authors in the Nature Conservancy Magazine must have collaborated to illustrate the power of similar sounds. As examples for blog content writers, I chose just four of the many titles in that issue:

Roots Rewind
This is an example of classic alliteration. Both words begin with the same consonant.

Keep Carbon
Although the two words begin with different letters, this is another example of alliteration, because the consonant sound is the same.

Orca Answers
Assonance refers to the repetition of vowel, rather than consonant sounds. These two words are not a precise match, but are similar enough to resonate with readers.

Grand Stand
These are rhyming words, where the initial letters are different, with the remaining sounds the same.

A couple of years ago at Say It For You, I began calling attention to the idea of using alliteration in business blog titles with an eye to making them more “catchy”. You see, it’s one thing to write great content, and quite another to get readers to click on it, and alliteration is just one of several creative writing techniques that can make your business correspondence – or your blog title – more engaging.

“It is important to note that alliteration is about the sounds of words, not letters; therefore, the letters “k” and “c” can be used alliteratively (as in the Keep Carbon title above) The letters “s” and “c” (as in sparkle and cycle) could also be used in alliteration. As ereadingworksheets.com explains, the words don’t need to be directly next to each other in the sentence or stanza to be considered alliterative, but a good guideline to follow is whether you can detect the repetition of sound when you read the line aloud. Meanwhile, “It beats as it sweeps as it cleans” (an advertisement for Hoover) is an example of vowel sound repetition in the form of assonance.

At Say It For You, where one of our core teachings is that blog posts are NOT ads, we know it’s important to keep a light touch in order to avoid overuse of similar-sound techniques such as rhyming, assonance and alliteration. The goal, after all, is to “season” the content without “over-salting” it.