Scansion in My Voice

“Professor, you have scansion in your voice,” said a student to me the other day. “Scansion” is of course the wrong choice of words, but I understood what she meant – even though I am surprised that my elocution comes across like that.

I had this student last semester in my one poetry class – this is where she learned the term “scansion”, although she uses it somewhat wrongly in this context. Scansion is the analysis of verse into metrical patterns. In other words, through scansion one determines rhythm and meter in a poem by establishing the stressed and unstressed syllables in the words in the lines of poetry. So when my student said “Professor, you have scansion in your voice,” she meant that there is a rhythm in the way I speak. She continued to say that a number of other students made the same observation.

I wonder if this “rhythm in my voice” is a good or a bad thing. And to apply her use of the term “scansion”, I’m curious to know if I speak in a distinct meter? Do I speak in snippets of iambic pentameter?!