 You may have heard of trochaic to-trameter before, maybe a teacher has mentioned it, maybe a super clever student in your class has mentioned it, but you're not quite sure what it means, and the word just sounds way too intimidating to even begin to figure out what it means, let alone apply it either to poetry analysis or to analyzing a Shakespeare play. However, what I want to show you is when it comes to to-trameter, what it means and how to spot it in poetry and plays is actually fairly straightforward, as long as you follow these really simple three steps, okay? Now, the reason why it's actually really important to know some of these advanced techniques is because one of the, I would say poorly kept secrets of really high achieving English students is they tend to go the extra mile in learning slightly more rare techniques that either they haven't necessarily learned in school formally from their teachers, or if the teachers have taught them what it means, they have gone the extra mile to actually find this and apply it when they are doing analysis of any kind of poem or any form of literature, okay? However, what I want to show you, especially today and in this video, is how easy it is to spot some of these techniques, these fairly advanced techniques that actually fetch quite a lot of marks, okay? So, when it comes to to-t-t-trameter, it's just a fancy way of saying a sentence with eight syllables, so you can clap eight times as you read through all of the syllables, and the first syllable is stressed, so it takes just a little bit longer to pronounce, the second syllable is unstressed, and these, this pairing, so the first syllable being stressed slightly longer to pronounce, the second syllable being stressed, being unstressed, which means slightly shorter to pronounce, these happen in the pair, which is what we call a trokey, okay? So, a stressed syllable and an unstressed syllable is a trokey, this pair happens four times, okay? So, there's four trokeys, stressed, unstressed, one, stressed, unstressed, two, stress, unstressed, three, stress, unstressed, four, okay? So, in total, there are four stressed syllables in this line of poetry and four unstressed syllables also in the same line of poetry, and really, these four trokeys make up what we call a trocaic tritrameter. I will show you an example of this taken from Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, and this is taken from act four, scene one, where the witches are basically looking at this cauldron, it's bubbling up and they're conjuring the underworld, okay? So, of course, they're part of the supernatural world and they state, so the witches state, double, double, tall and treble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. Now, this is a perfect example of trocaic tritrameter because as you can see, I've underlined the first stressed syllable in red and the second unstressed syllable in green. So, as you can see here, double, double, tall and treble, duh, takes a little bit longer. That's why it's what we call a stressed syllable, it takes just a little bit longer as a syllable to pronounce, bull is a unstressed syllable because it takes just a little bit shorter to pronounce, same goes for double again here, then toil takes a little bit longer as a syllable to pronounce and takes a bit shorter and of course truh and treble takes a little bit longer to pronounce, whilst bull in trouble again takes just a little bit shorter and the same goes for fire or rather fire burn and cauldron bubble. Okay, so fire, burn and cauldron bubble. Again here, as you can see, this one takes a little bit longer to pronounce, this takes a little bit shorter to pronounce, longer to pronounce, shorter to pronounce, longer to pronounce, shorter to pronounce, shorter to pronounce, shorter to pronounce. Okay, so this is just one of several examples that you can spot in literature, especially in poetry of what we call trocaic tritrameter. So always just remember just to recap, trocaic tritrameter is just a fancy way of saying a sentence with eight syllables. The first is stressed, the second is unstressed, the third is stressed, fourth is unstressed, fifth is stressed, sixth is unstressed, seventh is stressed, eighth is unstressed and of course there are four trochies, so the pairing of the stressed and unstressed syllable, this happens four times within this line. So that's really it when it comes to trocaic tritrameter. Always remember that if you can, try your best to go the extra mile when you're looking at poetry or even plays when you're analyzing them to see if there's any example of this. Of course not all poets use this, Shakespeare for example, even if he uses this in this line with the witches, he doesn't use it consistently throughout the play, however he alters the rhythm and so does a poet when they're writing and sometimes part of altering the rhythm is writing using these different types of rhythm within their writing. So that's it when it comes to trocaic tritrameter. Thanks so much for listening.