Working on my metre

[Leanne]

Try an exercise in iambic pentameter. Fix the meter in your head and then put the words in. There is no way to get around practising, because in English some of the stresses are so subtle that they will actually change depending on the words that are around them.

This is excellent advice:

For a couple of general English rules:
Many one-syllable words can work as either stressed or unstressed. You have to judge some special cases.
- I don't recommend stressing "in"
- I don't recommend stressing "the"
- I don't recommend making "I" (pronoun) unstressed.

In general, you want to use the meter to stress important words. Don't have stresses fall on pointless fillers. Incidentally, there's no point in trying to just chop up a piece of prose into iambic pentameter. Why bother using any element of poetry at all when you're not entering into the spirit of it? That's like saying you practice Buddhism just because you're fat and like people rubbing your belly.