Primer: Touch Typing

Hi! After taking a break for the summer I thought I'd come back gently with a primer on (what I consider) a useful life skill that I've got into properly recently. Hope you're all well, anyway.


I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I probably type more words in a day than I actually speak aloud (slightly skewed as I've been at home for a bit and my family currently based here tend to be at work a lot of the time), and I get the impression that this isn't so unusual for people of my age and interests.

It used mostly to be the case that people who had to use keyboards (once that group had expanded beyond professional typists) would either "learn to type" (that is, learn to touch type) or rely on a so-called hunt and peck method where you physically look at the keys and pick out the ones you want with one or two fingers, usually the index fingers on each hand. The system that I and a lot of my friends have ended up with is a hybrid system, where we can type blind (without looking) fairly quickly, but not using the classic touch typing method (which uses all the fingers in a regular pattern).


Key Points [link]

One of the little projects I've been working at since I last posted here has been learning to type "properly", i.e. according to proper touch typing technique. I'm still getting the hang of it (I'm typing this post using it, easily at about half the speed I could type with previously), but I think it's a worthwhile thing to be able to do.

I got to this point by going back to looking at more efficient ways to get text into a computer than the standard QWERTY layout (such as Dvorak, Colemak and even chorded stuff as well as steno), which at the end of the day is all really interesting, but looking at the amount of time and effort involved (and the fact that there's no guarantee that someone else's setup will have or support your favourite alternative) made me think it'd be more useful just getting better at QWERTY for now.


Why bother? [link]

When I'm learning a new skill (for instance a new instrument) I think it's important to make sure I've got the basic techniques right. If you're lucky, bad technique just makes your job harder, and after a certain point you have to go back and laboriously re-muscle memorise a load of core stuff, which is annoying, and happens a fair amount in self-teaching (I had to rework a load of stuff on guitar one year in, for example). If you're unlucky, you won't notice your sloppy technique until you do yourself a serious injury at some point, meaning you may not be able to carry on doing your thing or indeed several others. (I heard someone say recently that tendinitis has killed more music careers than heroin - us drummers have to watch our backs as well.)

If you type using a hybrid system you've slowly come up with over the years through frequent Internet use, the chances your index and middle fingers do most of the work. This means there's a fair amount of stretching and shifting going on to get to the different parts of the keyboard, and where there's a lot of uncomfortable stretching going on carpal tunnel syndrome may be waiting on the other side. The idea with touch typing is to balance the work as evenly as possible between your fingers, which also reduces the amount of hand movement you'll need to do. As a bonus you'll probably eventually be able to type faster as well, though be prepared for your words per minute rate to fall dramatically at the start if you do try it out.


Settling In [link]

Good news! If you can already type blind (without looking), you've got a leg up over a lot of beginner typists. The focus will then be on retraining your fingers to pick the right keys unprompted.

To start, we'll get the home position down.

How to get into the home position

1. Lightly rest the index finger of your left hand on the F key and the index finger of your right hand on the J key. (They should both have some kind of dot on so you can find them quickly.)
2. Rest the other three fingers of each hand in a line next to them, so that the keys you're touching are ASDF and JKL; respectively.
3. Finally, rest your right thumb on the space bar (your left thumb can just hover; it isn't used in classic touch typing) and raise the angle of your hands slightly so that your wrists are in the air.

This is the resting position that you start and return to in touch typing. Take your hands off and practise jumping to it without looking. Now you know why the bumps are there!


At Home [link]

Very slowly (slow enough that you can do it without making any mistakes - the temptation to rush is natural and treacherous) practise keeping your fingers in the home position and typing each letter. I suggest getting into the habit of pressing each key as lightly as will register to reduce wear and tear on the keyboard and more importantly your hands. If you like, try saying each one aloud to associate the finger movement and the key better - I found that the spacebar came pretty naturally, as did the commoner letters, but getting a handle on J, K and ; took quite a while, especially once I starting having to move around a bit more.

If you like, try typing these venerable chestnuts of the touch-typing world that only use home position keys:

AS	ADD	LAD	JADA
LA	SAD	LASS	FLAK
JA	FAD	FADS	FLASK

Yes, there aren't many with J. Sorry about that, it's almost like it's a really uncommon letter in English or something.


Playing Away [link]

You may have noted that the keyboard and indeed the alphabet contains more than eight keys/letters, which is inconvenient but difficult to avoid. The way we get past this is that each finger is responsible for the keys above and below it.

So, for instance, you type an E (a useful skill) by moving the middle finger of your left hand from its home position on D up a row, and then as soon as it's finished it goes back home again. That's very important, and why we practised picking out the home position again before - the method only works if you run things primarily from the home row.

A thing that I came up against is the fact that the keys slant a bit between rows, presumably in some misguided attempt at being ergonomic, so sometimes when working things out I found it helpful to slide my hands into a home position a row up or down (so for instance moving up to QWER UIOP or down to ZXCV M,./) to see where I was aiming for.

To test this out, I suggest you (slowly) work out how to type each of the vowels (not including Y just for the moment), again saying the key aloud to bind the motion to the letter And Then Going Back To The Home Position. While you're at it you may as well get to grips with the comma and the full stop (which you're welcome to call a dot or a period if that makes you happy) as well.


Worth Pointing Out [link]

Something you might have noticed right from the off is that the home position and its up- and down-versions leave an awkward gap between your hands (on the home row, covering the G and H keys). To get these ones you stretch the respective index fingers across a key. I know I said before that we're trying to avoid stretching, but with the amount you're avoiding in general I don't think this'll hurt too much.

Going back to the unhelpful key camber, this means that your left index finger is responsible for B as well, which on my keyboard is about an inch from the home position. I still get my right index finger reflexively hopping over and hitting it an annoying amount of the time, but it's worth sticking to the proper fingering so that you can type faster and cleaner in the long run.

A thing that I had fun with and might help you as well is coming up with a mnemonic for what letters are used on each finger, going home-up-down as the home positions are the most memorable. Make yours as silly or lewd as will stick best. I came up with:

A QuiZ			KI-KOMMAn	(,)
Some WaX	FoR VeGeTaBles	HYNJUM!	LOw-DOT	(.)
DECoys			SEMA-Ph-OR	(; /)

(Kikkoman is a brand of soy sauce that I noticed in the family kitchen and amused me. Please don't DMCA me, guys...)

Whether you bother with my daft system or one of your own, I've found it useful to sit down before doing some typing and do the type-and-say-aloud association game going through each finger in the order above (so going AQZ SWX DEC FRV-GTB and so on).


Out Of The Comfort Zone [link]

The home row and its neighbours we've looked at make up the majority of what you'll need to type, but there's also some important stuff to the right of the semicolon and elsewhere. What you do there (and for keys to the left of the A key) is to stretch with the little finger of the relevant hand. Yes, more stretching, but still less than hybrid or (perish the thought) hunt and peck. The bigger keys over here like Backspace, Enter and Shift are easier to get at because of their size, apart from which you'll probably only really need the apostrophe and the question mark with any regularity. (Unless you're one of those tiresome people that refuses to nest round brackets and switches to other ones [like this {or this}] in which case you're on your own.)

Which brings me to an important point: how to touch type the Shift keys. The idea is that you use the Shift key with the little finger on the opposite hand to the one you want. This takes a fair bit of getting used to, but once you've got it down it really helps to keep your flow when you need to use a capital letter or a symbol like the question mark (which is what that abrupt segue was playing off, if you're feeling a little conversational whiplash).


Your Number Is Up [link]

For the sake of simplicity I've left the number keys out till now, but you just treat them like another upper row on top of the letter keys (so the relative home position is 1234 7890 with the index fingers covering 5 and 6 as well). It's tempting if you need a quick symbol like an exclamation mark or a pair of brackets just to go for it with an index finger, but as always If You Use The Right Fingers There Will Be Cake. Plus I find it kind of fun to do the slightly ridiculous finger gymnastics for an exclamation mark.


Some Footnotes [link]

That just about covers the standard keys. I don't know if you go in for keyboard shortcuts (though if you're seriously considering effectively relearning how to type for efficiency I imagine you might be), but I haven't found much consensus about how you should go for Ctrl, Alt, Start, F0 keys and so on (probably because they're a comparatively recent addition since the days of the typewriter).

I tend to alternate between left and right Ctrl in the same way as for the Shift keys, and as I'm on a laptop with an Alt and AltGr combo (and I use enough weird characters that my AltGr key sees actual use)  I've found it comfortable to put my left thumb to work for when I want to use a keyboard shortcut that involves it (and move my right thumb off the spacebar for AltGr). I imagine that probably won't be a problem for especially many people, though - same with the function keys. (They're infrequent and cumbersome enough on a laptop I don't mind about breaking touch typing flow to get at them.)

If you have and use a numeric keypad to the right of the standard keys you might see that the 5 key has a marker on it like the F and J keys, which is for using your right hand with your middle finger on the 5 and using that row as a miniature home row. If you do a lot of data entry it might be worth working at, but I deal with few enough numbers in my pampered humanities world that the normal number keys are fine for me.

As a last remark, you're actually doing a pretty significant amount of rewiring, and in all probability suddenly putting your smaller fingers to a lot more use than they've previously had to deal with. It's normal for your wrists and forearms to ache a bit after a good typing session when you're first switching over - if that's happening, maybe have a break and come back to it later the same day or leaving it till the next.


In Summary


A more colourful version of the above. Source

If you've gone through all of the above then congratulations! You've got the basic knowledge you need to make a go of touch typing. There's plenty of online games and resources to work at your speed and precision (I like http://www.typing-lessons.org for a gradual walkthrough of the various zones and http://www.typingstudy.com for letting you practise with your local layout rather than assuming you've got a US setup) but I've found I got and get as much satisfaction (if not more) from just opening my text editor and typing what I'm thinking or chatting to people (apologising for any mis-hits in advance...) as from sitting there and typing things against the clock that beep when I get something wrong (as useful as that is).

Since I've started touch typing seriously I've found that the activity of typing is much less tiring than it was (even if I still get the wrist aches after a protracted bout, though less than at the start), as I'm no longer hopping around with my hands as much and so can approach typing with a smoother rhythm, if that's not too abstract a way of putting it.


Good luck! I hope this little interlude is helpful. I'm putting the finishing touches on one or two pieces I thought would fit in here, so hopefully see you in a week!

Primer: Metre

(When I was thinking of setting this blog up, my initial vision was of a place where I could explain things that interest me to the interested layperson. The thing that strikes me about Internet learning resources is that they're usually either very introductory or very advanced; there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground in the spirit of the primers of yore, where with a bit of concentration you'd be briskly presented with the rudiments of the particular subject and then sent on your way to jump into the real deal.

Regular readers (hello, I'm honoured to be your procrastination material!) will probably be bored to tears by me continually sawing on about adult-level learning, but there it is. There are problems when you're just exposed to the primer system, of course - it's quite easy to fall behind when the course is moving at such a pace in order to get you up to speed quickly. In this regard, I think it's much better that we have a more forgiving education system than previously. There's no shame in not understanding something the first time, after all, aptitude is often a complex and uneven thing. I'm just supporting having more options in terms of free Internet learning.

In this topic I'm much indebted to Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled - if you're starting off in this subject it's well worth checking out.) Also, sorry if Courier New isn't your cup of tea; the scansion marks are a lot harder to show otherwise.

This is a guide to metre, which is useful for all sorts of things to do with words, from poetry to music to linguistics. I've tried to make this as direct, accessible and free-standing as possible - so no non-English examples, no IPA, and a minimum of linguistic comment and links. I might do a separate post with the bits I've cut, who knows...

Anyway, before we start, here are some misconceptions about metre that I'd like to put to bed:

1. Metre is not restricted to sonnets and the like
2. Neither is rhyming, though it's a bit more obvious
3. If you think writing using them makes the work clunky or unnatural, I would suggest that you're not reading very good examples.

Learning Your Scales [link]

The word metre comes from the Classical Greek métron, meaning "measurement" (like the metric system). Think of it like sitting a word on a weighing scale; the act of doing this is called scansion, and how the word scans is called its quantity (from Latin quantus, meaning "how much, how many" - how much does the word weigh?).

When scanning a word, we look at each syllable and determine:

1. Is its vowel long or short? (Length)
2. Does it end in a consonant? (Weight)
3. Is it stressed or unstressed? (Accent)

Let's look at how scansion is usually done in Standard English:


Accent

So, let's start with the last item, because it's the focus in English. In Standard English we have a stress-based accent, so this means that accented syllables will have stress, and unaccented syllables will not. So (for example) in O.pen.ing, de.CIE.ver and de.sel.ECT the first, second and third syllables respectively are accented (i.e. stressed), and the others aren't. A further thing to note is that because English is stress-timed, we further emphasise the stressed syllable by reducing (or squashing) the other syllables. (We have a thing known as secondary or weak stress, for example at the start of OV.er.DONE, but that needn't bother us for now.)


Length

The length of a syllable is, on an intuitive level, just how long it takes to say it. The naïve interpretation (in the sense of the first thing you'd think of) is that syllables can be short or long depending on their vowel. The slightly more complex reading is that syllables contain moras (from the Latin for "time period, delay") - one mora for a short vowel, two for a long one.

In English the convention is that the vowels in pat, pet, pit, pot, put, putt, and at the end of puma, puppy, and panther are short, and the rest (either single vowels like in father or diphthongs like how) are long. This is fairly intuitive; the sound of hat does feel shorter than that of hate or heart or hear.


Weight

Syllable weight is sometimes ignored in English metrical considerations, but I think you do so at your peril. A syllable is light when it has no consonant on the end, and heavy when it does. So he is light, but hit and him are heavy. More than one consonant on the end, or the combination of being heavy and with a long vowel, can be called superheavy. So the words loads and strengths are superheavy. (Moraically, a heavy syllable like hit has two moras, and a superheavy one has three).

A thing to bear in mind with syllable weight is that because syllables rarely come in isolation, if a heavy syllable is followed by one beginning with a vowel, the last consonant of the heavy syllable can be "adopted" to be the first of the next. This is the same process that operated on the words orange, uncle and umpire ; they all used to begin with an N in English, but because in speech people said anorange, anuncle, anumpire, the N went the other way (an.orange rather than a.norange).

The net result of this is that when analysing syllable weight, you can only be really sure a syllable will stay heavy if it has two or more consonants at the end (is superheavy) or comes at the end of a line (because there's nowhere to palm the last consonant off onto).


Moving Your Feet [link]

English poetic metre is a slightly strange compromise. It's based on Latin and Greek metres, which work mainly on Weight/Length rather than on Accent. They could do this because they had what's called contrastive vowel length - effectively, a vowel could be long without being accented, which sounds a bit odd to English speakers. (Try saying mēnsa (Latin for table, macron means long) then mēnsā (with a table) with the A the same length as the E. Feels like you've dislocated your jaw, doesn't it!)

So Classical scansion contrasts between Short/Light (one mora) vs Long and/or Heavy (two or more). To avoid muddling our terminology I'll refer to the former as Weak and the latter as Strong.

A metrical form is usually defined as a series of feet (think of them like steps in a dance). In Classical verse (which English and other verse is usually imitating) the commonest feet are named like so:

[v v]	Pyrrhic	(PIR-ik)
[v -]	Iamb	(I-am)
[- v]	Troche	(TROH-kee)	or	Choree	(KOR-ee)
[- -]	Spondee	(SPONN-dee)
[v v -]	Anapaest	(AN-uh-peest)
[- v v]	Dactyl	(DAK-til)
[v - v]	Amphibrach	(AM-fi-brak)
[- v -]	Amphimacer	(AM-fi-may-ser)	or	Cretic	(KREE-tik)
[- - -]	Mollossus	(muh-LOSS-us)

If you think the grouping looks odd, it's because I've done it the Classical way, where a strong [-] is worth two, and a weak [v] is worth one. So the spondee [- -] is in with the dactyl [- v v] and not the iamb [v -] because it adds up to four, not three.

A helpful way to think about this type of metre is to treat it like a musical beat.

Homer's favourite metre is called dactylic hexameter, and it goes like this:

   x4
 -  v v | -  v v | -   -
 -   -  |        | -   v

So it's got six feet (as you'd expect from hexameter), the first four of which can either be dactyls or spondees, and then the fifth is always a dactyl and a spondee, or a dactyl and a... troche? It looks like we're missing a weak beat there, but it's a fairly common thing to let whoever's reciting the line take a quick breath before going onto the next line. As epic poetry used to be recited from memory for hundreds and hundreds of lines, you can see why they needed it.

So two valid hexameter lines could go like this:

 -   -  | -  v v | -   -  | -   -  | -  v v | -   -
 -  v v | -   -  | -  v v | -   -  | -  v v | -   v  

Try tapping that out on your knee or something. You can keep a steady pulse going through the whole thing without much trouble. Incidentally, that dactyl-and-spondee ending bit is called an Adonic. We'll come back to it later.


Acute Angles [link]

As I mentioned earlier, Standard English is a stress-timed language, so a system based on syllable weight wouldn't work. Instead, we take the above system and redefine it to work mainly on Accent instead.

So Shakespeare's favourite metre, iambic pentameter, theoretically is made up of five unstressed-stressed pairs:

    v    /  | v   /  | v     /   |  v    /| v  /
 "The plough|man home|ward plods | his wea|ry way" (Grey's Elegy)

(I'm marking a stressed syllable with [/] to distinguish it from a heavy/long [-].)

You'll note I said "theoretically". Because we're not using the metre to keep time, we can mess around with it a bit more.

Some common tricks are:

1. Feminine ending
   You add an extra weak syllable to the end of the line. So-called because in French, grammatically feminine adjectives have an extra -e on the end.
   
      v  /  | v  /    |   v /    | v   /   | v    / v
    "Be not | afear'd - the isle | is full | of noises" (The Tempest)


2. Trochaic inversion
   You turn an iamb round into a troche.
   
       /    v  | v  /    |   /    v   |  v  /   | v  /
    "What's in | a name? | That which | we call | a rose
   
      v /| v /|  v   /   |   v     /   | v     /
     By a|ny o|ther name | would smell | as sweet" (Romeo and Juliet)
   


3. Pyrrhic and spondaic substitution
   Where you replace the iamb entirely either with two weak or two stressed (can be one stressed, one heavy). With the features of Standard English outlined above, this will usually mean two separate, short words.
   
      v  / | v   /  |  v  v  |   /  v  |   v   /   v
    "To be | or not | to be? | That is | the question." (Hamlet)
   
     v    /   |  /   /     |   v   /  |  v     /|  v /
    "Oh brave | new world, | that has | such peo|ple in't!" (The Tempest)

The third item is probably the most open to interpretation: individual actors and readers will place emphasis in different places - for instance, if the person performing Miranda's line chooses to stress the ''such'' as well (that has such people in't!), it would be natural to make the previous foot a pyrrhic in anticipation of the spondee. A classic example of a line with varying scansion is the famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Which of the first three words are you stressing? I think I'd stress the "Shall" - it's a bit hard for me to work out what I'd do naturally because this was my English teacher's favourite example of pentameter, so they'd go "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" which would sound ridiculous if you tried to read it out like that.

It's also worth mentioning Byron's famous comment that he knew the quantity of every word in English except for scissors: if our only criterion is accentual (ie. stressed/unstressed), we're stuck - it doesn't scan [/ v] (like question), but it doesn't scan [v /] or [v v] either (not even [/ /] as new world). If we allow the consideration of syllable weight as well, though, we can offer [/ -] and our problems are solved.


Volta Means Turning Away [link]

All these technical names for metre are very nice and all, but they're kind of missing the point. As we can see above, quantitive metre terms (as in, where your strongs and weaks add up) don't really fit for a stress-based accent. If you look at what was here before we started copying Classical forms, we had what is called an accentual-syllabic system. Basically, it means that you have a fixed number of stresses per line, and hang the number of unstressed syllables between them. This is nowadays known as sprung rhythm.

For my money, this is what separates the great poets from the good ones - you'll note that for my example of straight pentameter (without any frills) I had to use the Victorian Grey's Elegy, but my other examples are Shakespeare. He never lets the abstract ideal of five iambs get in the way of saying exactly what he means to say; in fact, I would argue that most of his lines scan more naturally if you view them as four-stressed sprung lines (like Beowulf!) with a break (caesura (siz-YOO-ruh), Latin cutting) between them:

   x  /  x   /   x  x |   /  x    x   /   x
 "To be, or not to be - that is the question:

   /  x    x   /  x  | x    x  /    x  /  x
 Whether 'tis nobler | in the mind to suffer

   x   /    x   /  x   | x   x  /   x   /  x
 The slings and arrows | of outrageous fortune

 x   x  /   /    | x  x    x   / x     /  x
 Or to take arms | against a sea of troubles

 x    x x  / x   /     x   |  x   /   x    /
 And by opposing end them. | To die, to sleep" ... (Hamlet)

(For sprung scansion, I'm using [/] for stressed and [x] for unstressed, ignoring length/weight)

Doesn't that read much more naturally than a plodding "To be or not to be that is the question"? I could go on and on about how Shakespeare stuff feels alive (he might conceivably have used the word thou in conversation) compared to the frequently turgid pastoral, mock-archaic stuff churned out in later eras (Would someone born in the 19th century ever say "he maketh" except for reading the Bible or taking the mick?), but that's beside the point. (Part of the effectiveness of Shakespeare's work is the fact that his lines are rarely end-stopped except for to make a point - phrases flow freely across line boundaries instead of pausing pompously every ten syllables.)

I think this is what gives metre its bad reputation in the population at large - people think of jingly, formulaic doggerel rather than living poetry. Remember the Adonic? You can clearly see under the sprung scansion that it appears twice in Hamlet's soliloquy (thát is the quéstion, Whéther 'tis nóbler) - it's a mainstay in English speech. If a prose passage is said to have "good rhythm", you can bet it'll probably use lóts of Adónics! Remember métre means weíghing: it lets you measure the musical quality of speech, the topography of a sentence. I can think of no better example of consciously musical speech than the King James Bible, which were it produced today would probably be classed as a verse translation.

(I didn't put the Adonics in the last paragraph deliberately, by the way - as you may recall, analysis is the art of seeing what's already there clearer, not muddying the waters by dumping in a load of artifice.)

The master of this idea of poetry as musical speech is Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's him that rediscovered (and named) the sprung rhythms in Shakespeare and folk forms, and him that gives us the most beautiful and perfect modern examples. The following are the first two stanzas of the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, his longest work and masterpiece. The scansion scheme is taken from the notes to my edition:

1.	2.	Stresses
/  \  x x    /	/  x   x   /	2
THOU mastering me	I did say yes
\    / x  x     /   x      /	\ x   /    x   x    /      /	3
God! giver of breath and bread;	O at lightning and lashed rod;
/         /      /  x    x   /	x   /      x   /x    x   /      x  /	4
World’s strand, sway of the sea;	Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
/   x   / x   x     /	x  /  x   x    /    x  /	3
Lord of living and dead;	Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
\  x     /    /    x     /   x   \   /    x   x   /	x   / x     x  /     /  x  x    /x  x    /	5
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,	Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
x   /  x  x  /  x   x  /      /   x      /	x    /  x  x   /     x    x    /  x     x  /   x     \   /	5
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,	The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
/  /x    x    \      x   /    x x  /	/    /    x   x  /  x  x    /	4
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?	Hard down with a horror of height:
/ x  x  /  x  /x    x  /  x  x    /      /	x     x  /  x   x    /   x     / x   \    /     x    / x x     /	6
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.	And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

([\] indicates an uncounted weak, secondary stress; if in your accent feel, hour, fire are monosyllabic, my apologies, in mine they aren't. It doesn't make a difference here.)

Do yourself a favour and read it aloud. The sounds swim on your tongue deliciously, the music of the heavy and light syllables and rich assonance and internal rhyme make you feel the crashing of the waves and the swell of the sea in their masterful rolling. This is poetry (which in Greek means "crafting") - we are shown how the everyday billows and swirls just beneath our grey ordinarifying vision.


A Glance at Rhyme [link]

I suspect you're already familiar with the basics of rhymes, so I'll keep it brief. They're a good way to build structural integrity in poems (the rhyming lines support each other like girders), and are often specified in the shape of different poetic forms. If you look at the quoted Deutschland stanzas above, for instance, you can see that the rhyme scheme is ABABCBCA.

As we have masculine and feminine lines, so we also have masculine and feminine rhymes: masculine scanning [/] (hit/bit), feminine [/ v] (frozen/chosen). In English masculine rhymes are by far the commonest type, though in other traditions (like French) it's usual to alternate between feminine and masculine for each couplet. When notating rhyme schemes that specify whether a rhyme has to be masculine or feminine, it's conventional to use lowercase for feminine and uppercase for masculine (yay patriarchy), so an Onegin stanza is aBaBccDDeFFeGG:

My uncle — high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him —
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"

(This ingenious translation mirrors the jaw-dropping ingenuity of Pushkin's original Russian - it's very hard not to make feminine rhymes sound clunky or gimmicky in English.)

Pushkin's Onegin stanza is a modified form of a Shakespeare sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) in which he uses each permutation of the two-rhyme quatrain (four-line stanza) - ABAB (crossed rhyme), AABB (flat rhyme) and ABBA (envelope rhyme). This gives a bewildering disorientating effect, making you lose your bearings until the final couplet snaps you back into place (frequently containing a salty epigram or joke, as here).

A last important concept in rhyming is the idea of full and half rhymes. All the examples so far have been full rhymes - a half rhyme is usually where the consonant doesn't match but the vowel does (sit/sick). You have the trade-off that half rhymes aren't as predictable (if you hear moon in a song it's almost always going to be spoon or June afterwards, isn't it...) but are also less satisfying than the genuine article. As the old saying goes, rhymes are a good servant but a bad master - it's rarely a good idea to write something just because it rhymes!


In Summary...

Wait, I hear you ask, what about a guide to the poetic forms? I'm afraid this post is more than long enough already - the good news is that on my old blog I explained the commonest forms at a fair bit of length. The bad news is it's analysing my own poems. I'm still quite proud of them, but if you don't trust me then feel free to give it a miss - there's plenty of explanatory stuff on the Internet if you Google.

So anyway, I hope that this overview has been useful, if you were feeling apprehensive about metre and how it works. Writing using metre and forms is, admittedly, difficult at first if you're not used to convincing your words to march in formation; but like a lot of worthwhile skills the more you work at it the better you'll get, and the more you'll enjoy it. I certainly feel like it gives an extra, musical dimension both to my reading and my writing.

(Go forth and have no fear! Or at least, have a vague idea of what's going on with metre so you know what to look up. Next week is another little departure as I comment on politics...)