Prosody, aside from being my new vocabulary word for the day, is incredibly important to me as a songwriter - but I haven't a clue how to teach other than to say, "speak your lyrics. Then sing them. They should more or less match." That's not very helpful, and way too simplistic.

People often neglect to think about the foot of the song - defined as a unit of stressed or unstressed syllables. Lyrics with the same foot and meter have interchangeable tunes - like "Amazing Grace and the theme from "Gilligan's Island."

It may help to simply have examples of songs that have foot (feet?) especially well matched to melody. For whatever reason I'm blanking on good famous examples at the moment - perhaps "Wild Mountain Thyme." You can speak the lyrics to the rhythm of the song and it still sounds like good poetry. For that matter I think most traditional songs I can think of are strong in this area - weak marriages of lyrics to melody tend to get cleaned up in the process of oral tradition.

Good luck with your workshop, Sharon!

Dan Schatz