Which speech delivery habits do the most people find annoying?

 I got curious and looked for data from surveys or polls about what speech delivery habits people find annoying. I found a blog post by Robbie Hyman at Words Matter on May 25, 2011 titled What to avoid when speaking to a group which listed percentages for nine habits from a Gallup poll. But he didn’t say when it was done, and I couldn’t find it on the Gallup web site. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A search in Google Books led me to page 98 in a 1999 book by Lillian J. Glass titled The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Verbal Self-Defense. That reference says the poll was done for her back in 1987 for the book Talk to Win. Results are shown above in a bar chart. The top five are interrupting (88%), cursing (84%), mumbling or talking too softly (80%) and a tie between monotonous boring voice and talking too loudly (73%). Note that Robbie Hyman’s blog post missed both the highest percentage (interrupting) and the lowest (foreign accent).    

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A book preview from Talk to Win shows more detail: there is a table listing percentages for both Annoys a Lot and Annoys a Little rather than just the Total. Those percentages also are included in an article by Martha Sherrill Dailey in the Washington Post on April 29, 1988 titled Hear ye, hear ye. That table is shown above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results for Annoys a Lot are shown above in a second bar chart. The top three are in the same order as for the Total. Results for Annoys a Little are shown above in a third bar chart. Mumbling (43%) has moved up from third to second, but Interrupting (29%) and cursing (28%) have dropped to almost the bottom of the list.

 

Other articles and blog posts also have reported incorrect results from that Gallup poll. Dirk Moller at Business Connections on October 26, 2010 has an article titled 7 Tips for developing a winning phone voice that claims a recent Gallup poll listed mumbling as the most annoying habit of speech. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An undated article by Linnaea Mallette at K.I.S.S. Speaking Tips titled V is for Vocal Variety said a Gallop Poll reveals that talking too fast annoys 55% of people surveyed. Back on November 2, 2009 I blogged about Gallop Poll: A type of drive-by opinion survey (presumably on horseback).

 

Visual feedback for vocal variety

Imagine practicing public speaking with a display showing a bar graph of how the pitch range for your voice was varying. It could silently warn if you were speaking in a monotone rather than conveying emotion via wide variations. Wouldn’t that be a great tool for increasing your vocal variety?

You don’t have to imagine it, because it already exists. In the October 2009 issue of an online magazine called Language Learning and Technology Rebecca Hincks and Jens Edlund at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm described a computerized system for Promoting Increased Pitch Variation in Oral Presentations with Transient Visual Feedback. They developed it as a research tool for teaching presentations in English as a second language. In the above image I called it a liveliness meter.

Right now it’s not a product that you can buy off-the-shelf. It might be someday though. As Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive once sang: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”