: How to understand the meter and pulse of lyrics in songwriting? I've been learning many different concepts as a beginning songwriter and have been working on applying them in my work. However, I can't seem to full understand

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I think you will find lots of information by reading about poetry and meter. Scansion is the "scanning" of a line of text to determine its meter. That is probably an important thing for you to look into. The basic idea is poetry (lyrics) can be written to fit into regular metrical patterns like iambic which is short/long or weak/strong. There are several other traditional meters. Writing within a meter can be one of several reason for choosing different words in a lyric.

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Some church hymn books contain an index of songs and of tunes and a metrical index:

In this metrical index the songs are organized regarding their lyric meters, in purpose that the song lyrics can be used together with different tunes.

If you once know a collection of some hundreds of hymns and songs (you don‘t need to know the lyrics of course) you will develop a feeling for the rhythms, the verse measures, jambic, trochaic etc. and also for the length of meters.

All you have to do is to know of each kind of meter a exemplary song and an standard tune from which you can develop your lyrics using the existing melody with the meter you are looking for.

Of course you can also count with your finger the beats and accents like we count the rhythm. (Mind the up beat and the syllables between the beats) or you sing the melody, count each note by number and find out the rhythmic mode.

The numbers tell you the syllables per line!

E.g.:

76

76

88

88

This means: this is probably a song existing by a verse of 4 lines (2 pairs of 2 lines: 6 and 7 syllables) and a chorus (4 lines of 8 syllables)

The pairing is concerning the rhymes.
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