{"id":404,"date":"2009-09-07T22:08:46","date_gmt":"2009-09-07T21:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=404"},"modified":"2009-09-07T22:08:46","modified_gmt":"2009-09-07T21:08:46","slug":"how-long-is-a-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/how-long-is-a-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"How long is a silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Responding to my last post<\/a>, 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! :) )<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Good enough.<\/p>\n

Except when it isn’t. What actually matters is how clear you are. Slow<\/strong> isn’t good. Slow enough<\/strong> is. Too slow boring.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}