By Lenore Skenazy.
It talks about the taboo alliteraton and rhyme have in modern creative endevors. But it makes a great case for their effectivness.
The fact is, alliteration is an amazing memory aid, and possibly the oldest one on earth. "Beowulf" was written alliteratively sometime around the year 1000 -- "Beowulf bode in the burg of the Scyldings" -- before poetry even rhymed. And now comes new evidence of just how powerful alliteration is.
"Our cognitive system is sensitive to overlapping sounds," says R. Brooke Lea, a psychology professor at Macalester College, where he studies how the mind retrieves words and ideas. He and his colleagues came up with a way to study that "sound sensitivity." They buried a simple word -- "barn" -- in a free-verse poem. Several lines later, the experiment participants were asked whether "barn" was part of the poem.
The ones who'd read it in a sentence filled with alliteration -- "all along the way-winding road, wary whispers of the old barn" -- were much quicker at remembering it if they were asked about it right after they read another phrase with lots of Ws ("the wooden willowy warp of wild-carrot leaf" -- hey, no one said it was great poetry).
What happened, according to Lea, is that one sound reminded the participants of another and brought the whole thought right back. In other words, a simple, familiar sound worked recall magic.
"When you think about advertising, what we are all trying to do is 'unaided recall,' right?" asked Deborah Armstrong, a senior VP at Mediaspace Solutions. And yet, she said, alliteration, with all its recall power, has fallen out of favor. When she was brand manager at Creative Playthings, the company used it all the time...
Students given a list of unfamiliar aphorisms that rhymed ("woes unite foes") rated them far more "true" than students given sayings that didn't rhyme ("troubles unite foes"). That's because rhymes go down easy, said the professor. "And stuff that's easy to process, you think is right."
