Harry Potter Alliteration

In "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" Professor McGonagall must teach the students to dance and encourage them to do so at the Yule Ball. She makes dancing seem both girly and manly through her descriptive alliteration. When targeting the females in the room, she states "inside ever girl a secret swan slumbers"; when targeting the males in the room she states "inside every boy a lordly lion prepared to prance." She uses alliteration as rhetoric to persuade the students to dance, and her message influences the girls more than the boys. She also uses alliteration to convey the seriousness of the situation to the students. She doesn't want them to act like a "babbling bumbling band of baboons." She gets her point across to the students, for at the Yule Ball they all dance. It took the boys longer to get the message because they were all hesitant about dancing at first, but Professor McGonagall effectively got the students to participate at the ball.

"Literature is the new Latin"

Literature, specifically books and novels, are comparable to the Latin language due to the fact that it is slowly dying out. "We have entered the three-minute world. Anything that takes longer is just not worth it" says Michael Reist, author of "Literature is the new Latin."  The reading of long novels, especially in school, is being replaced by students watching the movie or reading the summaries. Contributing to this shorter attention span is the amount of distractions like television, the computer, and cell phones.  Novels, and their summaries, are available in the palm of one's hand now; this is bringing about a change in the curriculum of English class. In some schools, literature has been replaced by literacy activities used to engage students online. Soon, the reading and studying of novels may be replaced completely by electronic alternatives.