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Your speaking pace is probably fine. Your pauses are the problem. · Speaker Hub
Your speaking pace is probably fine. Your pauses are the problem.
The 150 words per minute figure comes from conversation, not from stages. Copying it is how competent talks end up sounding flat.
•6 min read
Someone times a rehearsal, gets 175 words per minute, reads that the average is 150, and spends the next fortnight trying to talk slower. The talk gets worse.
Here is what that number is, where it came from, and what it does not tell you.
Where 150 comes from
The figure most often quoted traces to the National Center for Voice and Speech, which puts average conversation for American English speakers at around 150 words per minute. Summaries of the research, such as this overview of speaking rates, tend to put presentations lower, somewhere between 100 and 150, and podcast or audiobook delivery slightly higher.
Notice what that is a measurement of. Conversation. Two people, no stage, no structure, no stakes.
A keynote is not a conversation, and neither is a conference session or a panel answer. Borrowing conversation's average as a stage target is how you end up with a talk that is technically well paced and completely inert.
The number moves, and it should
Inside one good talk, the pace changes constantly, and the changes are what carry the meaning.
A story speeds up. That is what makes it feel like a story rather than a report.
A definition slows down, because the room is hearing the words for the first time.
A number slows down further, and then stops, because a figure nobody has time to absorb may as well not be said.
A familiar idea can move fast. The audience is already carrying it.
A speaker running at a constant rate has flattened all of that. Everything arrives with the same weight, so the room has no way to tell what mattered. This is the real cost of chasing an average, and it is worse than being slightly quick.
Fast is not the problem. Continuous is.
When someone says a speaker was too fast, they usually mean something more specific. They never got a gap.
Comprehension needs somewhere to happen. If the next sentence starts the instant the last one lands, the listener is choosing between processing what you just said and hearing what you are saying now. They cannot do both, so they fall behind, and once they are behind they stay behind.
A quick speaker with real pauses is easy to follow. A moderate speaker with no pauses is exhausting. The pause does the work people credit to speed.
Fix the stops, not the rate
Under adrenaline you cannot accurately judge your own tempo, which is why "just slow down" fails on stage. The instruction has nothing to attach to.
Pauses are different. A pause is an event. You can plan it, mark it, and notice afterwards whether you did it.
Go through your talk and mark a full stop, meaning a real one of two seconds or more, in four places:
Straight after your opening line, before you start the body.
After any number you want remembered.
At every transition between major sections.
Before your final line.
Four planned stops will drop your average pace without you thinking about pace once. They also happen to sit exactly where an audience most needs a beat.
Two seconds feels like ten
The reason speakers do not pause is that pausing feels dangerous. From behind the lectern, two seconds of silence feels like the room noticing you have forgotten what you were saying.
It does not read that way. From the audience it reads as control, and it is one of the few things that separates an experienced speaker from a competent one. This is the same mechanism behind filler words. The um exists because the silence felt unbearable, and the fix in both cases is getting used to the gap.
Practise it with a clock. Say a sentence, stop, count two full seconds, carry on. Do it until it stops feeling like an error.
When you genuinely are too fast
Some cases are real, and they share a cause. You are compressing.
If you have forty minutes of material and a thirty minute slot, no amount of pacing work will save it. You will speed up, because the alternative is not finishing, and the room will feel you racing.
The fix is cutting, not pacing. Take out a section. Not the sentences inside every section, which is the instinct and which produces a talk with all its skeleton and none of its meat. One whole section, gone.
Then rehearse to a timer with the pauses in.
What to measure
If you want a number, take two, because pace alone tells you almost nothing:
Words per minute across the whole talk, as a rough sanity check.
Longest stretch of unbroken speech, which is the number that actually predicts whether people followed you.
The second is harder to get by hand, which is what the speech analysis tool is for. It reads pace, pauses and fillers off the recording, so you can see where the talk ran continuously rather than guessing from how it felt.
The National Center for Voice and Speech puts average American English conversation at roughly 150 words per minute, and presentation advice commonly lands between 100 and 150. Treat that as a range rather than a target. A talk delivered at a metronomic 130 throughout is usually less clear than one that moves between 110 and 170 depending on whether the content is new or familiar.
Am I speaking too fast?
Speed on its own is rarely the fault. Audiences follow fast speakers comfortably when the structure is clear and the speaker stops between ideas. What people describe as too fast is usually too continuous, meaning no gaps in which to catch up. Check your pauses before you try to slow down.
How do I slow down when I am nervous?
Do not aim at your speaking rate directly, because under adrenaline you cannot judge it. Aim at the gaps instead. Mark three or four places in the talk where you will stop completely, and treat those marks as content. Fixing the stops brings the average down without making the delivery sound laboured.
The Speech Analyzer pairs your recording with a transcript and an estimated response timeline, and none of that is a measurement of how the room actually felt. Here is what the number is built from, what to check before you act on it, and why Compare matters more than any single score.
Two psychologists spent years studying um and uh and concluded they are words, not mistakes. Here is what to cut instead, and the one filler that actually costs you.
