How long is a silence

Responding to my last post, Jim suggested counting to five before moving on. (I presume you mean between sentences or something Jim – a fivebeat between each word is pretty slow! :) )

That got me thinking about an old hobby-horse of mine – the speed at which you should speak (including, of course, the length of your breaks!). Typically, of course, you’ll find a zillion bits of advice online that tells you to make sure you’re speaking slowly enough.

Good enough.

Except when it isn’t. What actually matters is how clear you are. Slow isn’t good. Slow enough is. Too slow boring.

The trick, of course, is to slow down enough to make what you say clear to your audience – and you can’t measure that in absolute terms. You simple can’t say “X words per minutes”. A lot of things come down to your clarity and the acoustics of the room.

The more clear your diction is, the faster you can talk: the more full of echoes the venue is the slower you need to be.

As a simple tip, to get a feel for the venue, try this… stand where you are going to be speaking (before the audience arrive) then clap and whistle. And importantly, listen to the echoes.

The clap should tell you how slow you need to be if you’re using a lower register and the whistle will tell you the same about your top end.

Yes, yes, I know, it feels odd – but you’ll soon get used to it – believe me, I’ve walked onto so many stages and done that I’ve lost count. It’s the most simple of tricks, but it’s uncannily useful.