Basically, stress words are considered CONTENT WORDS such as
- Nouns e.g. kitchen, Peter
- (most) principle verbs e.g. visit, construct
- Adjectives e.g. beautiful, interesting
- Adverbs e.g. often, carefully
Non-stressed words are considered FUNCTION WORDS such as
- Determiners e.g. the, a, some, a few
- Auxiliary verbs e.g. don't, am, can, were
- Prepositions e.g. before, next to, opposite
- Conjunctions e.g. but, while, as
- Pronouns e.g. they, she, us
Mark the stressed words in the following sentences. After you have found the stressed words, practice reading the sentences aloud.
- John is coming over tonight. We are going to work on our homework together.
- Ecstasy is an extremely dangerous drug.
- We should have visited some more castles while we were traveling through the back roads of France.
- Jack bought a new car last Friday.
- They are looking forward to your visiting them next January.
- Exciting discoveries lie in Tom's future.
- Would you like to come over and play a game of chess?
- They have been having to work hard these last few months on their challenging experiment.
- Shakespeare wrote passionate, moving poetry.
- As you might have expected, he has just thought of a new approach to the problem