As we've discussed previously on the podcast, in natural American English not every word receives the same amount of stress.

Content words usually carry the main message, while small grammatical words such as to, for, of, than, and as are often reduced and spoken with less prominence.

This episode builds directly on the episode two weeks ago on "finding the main point" in a sentence. We take the idea of the “spotlight” and apply it to function words throughout the sentence.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why English doesn't give every word equal weight
• What it means to reduce a word
• How to reduce to from /tu/ toward /tə/
• How to reduce for from /fɔr/ toward /fər/
• How to reduce of toward  ...