A stroke or head injury can leave you struggling to pronounce words. Often you have to relearn how to use muscles in your mouth and tongue. Practicing words with the same sounds – known as phonemes – is one way of doing this.

It just so happens that playing with particular sounds is something that poets and other writers know all about.

For example, alliteration is a technique where a writer includes lots of words that all make use of the same consonant sound, to create particular effects. So reading poetry aloud can be a great way of improving your speech.

In these exercises, we’ve found some inspiring lines from some of our favourite poems to help you practe your pronunciation.