Those CRAZY syllable counters!! Use your INSTINCTS! Revised - Andrea Dietrich's Blog

First of all, on a side note, I want to begin going through my contest now. I always wait till it's all full and then start seeing the poems for the first time. You still have at least an hour to check your syllables, etc. I am going to be one of the "strict" judges this time and just place ten but everyone who followed my rules will be on the list.

Ok, I want to talk about syllables, guys!  When I tell you to check yourself with a syllable counter, that does not mean I expect you to have to check every single syllable count. I think more than half the population knows how to sound out syllables. However, there are a few words that are questionable. Sometimes you need a  syllable counter because you honestly might not know the correct thing!  For example, dipthong sounds oy/ ay/ ow/ etc. are seen as ONE syllable. So a word like HOWL is indeed a one syllable word. Don't let the number of letters fool you. OW is the vowel sound and the initial H and the final L blend into the total sound. The sound IRE is one of the most confusing  sounds. Though some people might be pronouncing this word as FI/ RE(er), the whole word is (I believe) more often seen as a one syllable word. I think you just need to  be aware that the long sounds of English : A, E, I O U (with the way they are often represented with more than one letter) are one syllable sounds.. (NOTE: Some people disagree about words like Fire. I would just say, use it as a two -syllable word at your own peril. I have lost competitions for using it as two syllables and just now when I checked  three places online, they were giving it as one syllable, but I suppose someone could find  a source that gives it as two syllables and then reference that source underneath their poem).

Do not TRUST syllable counters! Please, people. Use common sense. Here is an example I recently found with my very own syllable counter that I gave people to use in my contests. Someone wrote the word MANES, as in the "manes" of many horses. Two different syllable counters (mine included) said that the word was pronounced MA/NES. WHAT????? I could not believe it. So I investigated and this is what I found in an online dictionary:

ma·nes

 or Ma·nes  (ma′nez′, mä′nas′)