Are you speaking too quickly or too slowly?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe, maybe not. Your rate (or pace) in words per minute can be measured (perhaps automatically by an app like Orai). Is there a best, optimal, or ideal rate (an average)? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An article by Matt Ramsey at Ramsey Voice Studio on March 6, 2021 titled 10 Secrets to a remarkable speaking voice claims:

 

“The ideal speaking pace is around 120 words per minute, or two words a second.”

 

A post by Danish Dhamani at at the Orai Blog on August 17, 2020 titled Rate of speech: Definition, bonus tips, ideal rate, calculation instead claims:

 

“The accepted ideal rate of speech is around 140-160 words in a minute.”

 

I went back to my copy of the eighth edition (2004) of Stephen E. Lucas’s textbook, The Art of Public Speaking. On page 300 he discusses rate and his first paragraph says:

 

“Rate refers to the speed at which a person speaks. People in the U. S. usually speak at a rate between 125 and 150 words per minute, but there is no uniform rate for effective speechmaking. Daniel Webster spoke at roughly 90 words per minute, Franklin Roosevelt at 110, John Kennedy at 180. Martin Luther King opened his ’I Have a Dream’ speech at a pace of 92 words per minute and finished at 145. The best rate of speech depends on several things – the vocal attributes of the speaker, the mood she or he is trying to create, the composition of the audience, and the nature of the occasion.”

 

In her initial 2006 hard-cover 2006 version of her book The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine had outrageously claimed that:

 

“….girls speak faster on average—250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males.”     

 

Mark Liberman disputed that in his Language Log on August 7, 2006 in a post titled Sex and speaking rate. Amanda Schaffer discussed it in Slate on July 1, 2008 in an article titled Pick a little, talk a little.Brizendine removed that claim from the paperback version.

 

How fast do speakers give their exhaustively-rehearsed TED Talks? At his Six Minutes blog for November 12, 2012 Andrew Dlugan has a post titled What is the average speaking rate? that discusses nine of them. The range is from 133 to 188 words per minute with an average of 163. Another post on February 26, 2018 by Nick & Melissa Enge at their The Science of Speaking blog titled Original Research: The “Slow Down” Myth reports speech rates for the Top Ten TED talks as ranging from 156 to 214 words per minute, with an average of 176.

 

I looked at Google Books to find how long ago speaking rate was discussed. Way back in 1846 Isaac Pitman, the British inventor of shorthand, described it on page 9 of his book The Reporter: Or, Phonography Adapted to Verbatim Reporting: 

 

“The rate of utterance by public speakers is commonly reckoned thus: - From 80 to 100 words per minute is slow; from 100 to 140 is moderate, 120 being considered by reporters the average of public speaking; and from 140 to 200 is rapid. Instances have often occurred of phonographers writing at the rate of 170 words per minute on a new subject, and 200 when the subject was familiar.”   

 

In 1855 Roswell Chamberlain Smith, on page 82 of his book Smith’s Inductive Arithmetic and Federal Calculator, listed rates for the following famous speakers:

 

“Words spoken in one minute:

John C. Calhoun from 180 to 200

Daniel Webster from 80 to 110

Henry Clay from 130 to 160

Elihu Burnitt from 130 to 160

Wendell Phillips from 140 to 170

Ralph Waldo Emerson from 140 to 170

Rev. Dr. [Stephen H.] Tyng from 120 to 140

Henry Ward Beecher from 180 to 250

Gerritt Smith from 70 to 90

 

The facts in the above table were furnished by Andrew J. Graham, Editor and Publisher of the Universal Phonographer and author of the ‘Reporter’s Manual.’ “

 

An 1887 publication titled The Cosmopolitan Shorthander, Volume 8, says on page 224 that while:

 

”125 words per minute is the traditional English standard of public speaking, but there is no longer any doubt that this is decidedly below the rate of the average American speaker, of whose speed 150 words per minute is perhaps a truer estimate.”

 

A cartoon of a tortoise and a hare was adapted from images at Openclipart, as was a speedometer.