Stress (pronunciation) — Activity

Say the word ‘record’ twice, once as a noun and once as a verb, and your own voice will show you the entire topic without a single rule being taught. The first syllable gets the punch when it names a thing — a REC-ord — and the second syllable gets it when it names an action — to re-CORD. English does not stress syllables randomly, and it does not stress them consistently either. It follows patterns tied to word endings and word type, and this topic is simply those patterns made explicit enough to mark correctly on an unfamiliar word in an exam.

In two minutes

Stress is the extra force given to one syllable of a word when it is spoken, it is fixed for any given word rather than optional, and while there is no single rule covering every word, a handful of patterns tied to word endings and to noun-versus-verb pairs cover most of what this exam actually asks you to mark.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of English – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.