Iambic Pentameter?

[Tedium]

I was going to write my reply in iambic pentameter, but it just wasn't worth the effort.

That made me laugh.

It really is a syllable/rhythm situation. You'll have to do some counting and reading aloud quietly to yourself, if you are having trouble identifying it.

Shakespeare wrote much of his literature in iambic pentameter. To hear how it sounds, listen to some recordings of people reading his sonnets. Find them online and read along so you can not only hear the rhythm, but see it.

On the subject of sonnets from Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor: "The miracle of the sonnet, you see, is that it is fourteen lines long and written almost always in iambic pentameter. I don’t want to bog down in the whole matter of meter right now,but suffice it to say that most lines are going to have ten syllables and the others will be very close to ten. And ten syllables of English are about as long as fourteen lines are high: square" (19).

That's a good book worth reading to help with easily understanding some really broad, but common concepts in literature. I enjoyed it and even found it helpful as an English major.