Word stress - Yes! It is important.

According to an excerpt from Wikipedia, in linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence.Stress is typically signalled by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in pitch.

A more friendly definition would be to pronounce the words in the English language with relevant emphasis on certain parts of the word, or certain words in a sentence, to produce an effect depicting your expertise of the language. 

Note: It is not just in English that you have word stresses, your mother tongue has them too, and you use them all the time.

It is very simple to learn the right word stresses:
  1. One word will have only one definite stress. However, longer words may have two stresses, but the second one is not as chief as the primary one.
  2. Only vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are stressed upon, not consonants.
Keeping syllables(parts of the pronunciation of a word) in mind is very important while choosing where to stress. Stressing the start or the end of a word may affect the meaning you want it to convey.

Eg: The word PRESENT,
when stressed  PRESent, it seems as a noun, indicating a gift, or the time right now, or the opposite of absent.

However,
when stressed preSENTit seems as a verbindicating giving or offering something.
There are many such examples falling in this category.
Word stress - Yes! It is important. Word stress - Yes! It is important. Reviewed by Devanshi on January 13, 2016 Rating: 5

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