A short while ago I posted on the issue of stress and timing in English. In order to help you understand the concepts, I’ve made a few recordings to illustrate my points. Here’s the short text I’ve prepared:

I’m very excited by the upcoming election. Here in the United States we choose a new president every four years. This year we’re electing a new president because president Bush has served two terms. He can’t run for the office of president any more. Why is this? One of the most famous presidents of all times was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was elected so many times - a total of four times - that congress decided to limit the number of times a president can serve. Since then, a president can only be chosen two times. In other words, the president can serve two terms.

rc="http://embed.snapvine.com/flash/starboard.swf?url=http://www.snapvine.com&urn=/api/get_blog_post/GDDzPHrYEd20fwAwSFxxvg&type=mini" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" quality="high" scale="noscale" salign="l" wmode="transparent" height="55" width="350" style="width:350px;height:55px" name="starboard" align="middle">
Comment | Copy This

Wow that was awful! I didn’t understand a word!

I’m not surprised if you didn’t understand anything. Obviously, I exaggerated greatly here, but it’s to make a point. You have to pick and choose what you want to accent and exaggerate. Here is the same passage, but it’s been marked up with my accents. Notice how I swallow words and glide over them (remember those are function words mostly). This method of bolding words that you will stress and underlining as well as bolding those words you want to emphasize help a lot with preparing any short speech or reading you give.

I’m very excited by the upcoming election. Here in the United States we choose a new president once every four years. This year, we’re electing a new president because president Bush has served two terms. He can’t run for the office of president any more. Why is this? One of the most famous presidents of all times was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was elected so many times - a total of four times - that congress decided to limit the number of times a president can serve. Since then, a president can only be elected twice. In other words, the president can serve two terms

Comment | Copy This

To improve your pronunciation, try taking a paragraph and marking it as I have done here. Just going through this process will immediately improve your pronunciation.