From Ginny Wiehardt,
Your Guide to Fiction Writing.
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Examples can provide a better understanding of what a literary device means, and how it functions, so that you can make use of it in your own work. These examples of assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repetition of consonants, have been compiled to help you do just that.

Examples of Assonance:

Mary Kinzie, poet and head of the creative writing program at Northwestern, gives this example of assonance from "Paradise Lost" in her book, "A Poet's Guide to Poetry":

...the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At ev'ning from the top of Fesole...

In this case, the assonance involves the sound u and o. Assonance and alliteration often work together. More examples of assonance are given below.

Examples of Alliteration

In "Moby Dick," Melville uses alliteration to build character and to help the reader experience the colorful scene on board a whaling ship. The character, Stubb, for instance, is described as having "rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general," and as saying "the most terrific things to his crew." His use of assonance is part of how Melville illustrates these things. "The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions," Stubb says, for instance. "Start her -- start her, my silver spoons! Start her, marling spikes!" (In this last quote, we have not only alliteration in the repetition of the s sounds, but also an example of assonance in the words "start" and "marling.")

In other places, these Melville uses these literary devices to build suspense and drama. For instance, the first time the ship comes across sperm whales, the type of whale they are after, the narrator says, "...neither of those can feel stranger and stronger emotions than the man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale." The repetition of the st sounds in "stranger" and "stronger" and the repetiition of the ch sounds in "charmed" and "churned" ("churned" also resonates, through assonance, with the word "sperm,") helps create a sense of the importance of this event.

Another example of alliteration at work comes from the author Donald E. Westlake ("The Hook"). The main characters are both writers; one of them, Wayne, has killed the other's wife. Wayne has been waiting for the news to pick up on the murder: "'Beautiful blonde bludgeoned' was the nicely alliterative phrase most of the media had settled on, though Wayne could have told them that they'd got that all wrong. It hadn't been like that at all." The alliteration in part makes fun of the typical headlines often used by papers, especially tabloids, but it is also part of how Westlake builds character. The fact that Wayne notices the alliteration helps characterize him as a writer. Furthermore, the fact that he's noticing it after committing a murder reveals something about his state of mind at that moment: he hasn't quite come to grips with what he's done.

While you may use assonance in more poetic moments of your prose without even being conscious of it, alliteration, as in the example of the "beautiful blonde bludgeoned," tends to call attention to itself. Unless you mean for this to happen -- to build character or drama, or to create a comic moment -- employ alliteration selectively.