Tuesday, September 25, 2012

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.

7 comments:

  1. I like that you were able to recall that Professor Mcgonagall used alliteration. It Was definately insightful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I really like what you said here. As a big Harry Potter fan myself, it's nice to see others who appreciate the literature.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alliterations being on of my favorite literary terms, I'm happy to see that they're found in one of my favorite movies as well. Alliterations are simple to understand and are fun to say. I'll keep my eyes open for more in the other Harry Potter movies.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A very interesting observation: literary AND linguistic. Improve on this post by using this fact about McGonagall's alliterative persuasion as a starting point to discuss the persuasive powers of alliteration in general. Do you see alliteration in politics and marketing? Does it have a hypnotic quality? Is it more persuasive than regular speech? Why?
    Keep this topic in mind for your capstone project (next marking period).

    ReplyDelete
  5. P.S.
    Don't forget to separate your ideas into paragraphs ...to develop your idea by "introducing it," proving it, and "concluding it."
    Read a few articles or blog posts written by professional writers to get a feel for how this is done.

    ReplyDelete
  6. McGonagall also uses alliteration in deathly hallows pt 2 when she says " Mr. Finnegan has a particular proclivity for pyrotechnics."

    ReplyDelete
  7. Magic is Might is another use of alliteration in Harry Potter.

    ReplyDelete