scansion

[Leanne]

One trick I'm trying is I've been told to rest your thumb on your neck right below your chin as you speak the stressed syllable your neck will press against your thumb. We'll let Leanne tell us if it works--gotta start somewhere.

I hadn't heard that before... I just tried it and it kind of works, but I don't know that I'd recommend it as a technique, it makes you look a bit of a knob

Speech has a rhythm, it rises and falls. The rises are what we refer to as stressed syllables, and we tend to draw them out a tiny bit longer than the unstressed falls. There are schools of scansion that insist you can break every sentence into units of meter and I guess technically they're right, but it seems a waste of time to me and those guys really need to get a life. A word can have different metric patterns depending on the words around it, and a line can have different meter depending on the lines preceding and following, because we read poetry in a different rhythm to our normal speech. If you were to just "speak" a sonnet, it would sound ridiculous.

It IS a practise thing. You WILL get it. Just as there's no actual illness called tone deafness, I assure you that your feet will one day be less stinky.