Sentence Stress Video Oxford Online English English club: this is a free website for english learners that covers the rhythm of sentence stress. you can listen and practice with included bite-sized chunks of dialogue or learn about sentence stress rules. Tonic stress refers to the syllable in a word which receives the most stress in an intonation unit. an intonation unit has one tonic stress. it's important to remember that a sentence can have more than one intonation unit, and therefore have more than one tonic stress. See all sentence stress lessons! think about sentence stress as simply saying the most important words of a sentence a little bit louder, or for a little bit longer than the others. this is demonstrated with the words bought, car, and tuesday in the following sentence. i bought a car on tuesday. Why word stress matters. in her head, this sentence was understandable to saskia: “dessert is my how to stress english sentence favorite thing! ” but when she said thi...