Which word would you emphasize?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How you say something matters a lot. As is shown above, depending on which word we emphasize, the sentence: I didn’t say she stole my money can have seven distinctly different meanings. In writing we can show them using italics or color.

 

Where did this example come from first? A search at Google Books got me to it being on page 129 of the 1990 book titled Making Friends, written by Andrew Matthews. It is referenced by Tony Atwood on page 80 in his 1998 book Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Professionals.

 

On the internet it has shown up several times. The first I found was a brief article by Andy Lobban on May 5, 2009 simply titled I didn’t say she stole my money. It also was in an article by Steve Borsch on March 10, 2010 at Connecting the Dots titled Be VERY Careful Using Social Media. Also, it was in an article by Debra Yearwood at CommStorm on March 3, 2014 titled How to Present Data.

 

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.

 

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).

 

Savage Chickens cartoons with humorously bad advice on How To Be A Tough Guy

On July 9th Doug Savage started a series of his Savage Chickens cartoons showing bad advice about how to be a tough guy. As shown above, Lesson 2 is to Speak Louder Than Necessary. Lesson 1 is to Be Afraid To Express Your Emotions. Lesson 3 is to Spit On The Sidewalk. Lesson 4 is to Never Say “I Don’t Know.” Lesson 5 is to Never Show Any Signs Of Weakness.

Better advice by Brené Brown from the February 8, 2020 On Being radio show, titled Strong Back, Soft Front, Wild Heart is that:

“Feeling vulnerable, imperfect, and afraid is human. It’s when we lose our capacity to hold space for these struggles that we become dangerous.”

Three main dimensions and four questionable quadrants for vocal variety

If you don’t put some variety into your speaking voice, then your audience will get bored and fall asleep. Two YouTube video examples from movies illustrate how much difference vocal variety can make.

In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Ben Stein plays a high school economics teacher who calls the roll with a boring monotone drone. His student’s replies of “here” convey way more emotion than anything he does.

Contrast that with Meg Ryan who plays Sally in When Harry Met Sally. In the famous delicatessen scene she puts a load of emotion into the word “yes.”

Rate, volume, and pitch are three main dimensions of vocal variety.

But rate, volume and pitch may appear under other names, typically all beginning with the letter p, as a silly organizational device.  

Rate (or pace) can range from slow as molasses to faster than an auctioneer. The December 2016 issue of Toastmaster magazine had a brief unindexed Advice from the Pros article by Bill Brown titled Don’t Race the Pace. On July 31, 2017 Gavin Meikle had a longer article titled Vocal Variety Tip Part 2 – Perfect Your Pace. On September 1, 2017 September 1, 2017 Christian O. Lundberg had an article at at Pinnacle Persuasion titled Speech myths busted: Speed kills? Or, what is the best rate for a compelling presentation.

Volume (intensity, loudness, power, projection) can range from a whisper to a shout. The March 2017 issue of Toastmaster had another article by Bill Brown titled The Most Common Technique – Volume. On July 18, 2017 Gavin Meikle had another article titled

Six Elements of Vocal Variety and How to Master Them Part 1 – Volume.

Pitch (frequency) can range from low to high. In the February 2017 issue of Toastmaster Bill Brown had an article on Reading a Prepared Text that suggested adding pitch up or down markings. On September 5, 2017 Gavin Meikle had an article titled Vocal variety tips, part 3 – pitch and resonance.

The May 2014, issue of Toastmaster has a two-page article by Craig Harrison on Hearing Voices (use characters, personas, puppets and animal sounds to boost your vocal variety.

The Toastmasters International basic manual on Competent Communication covers vocal variety in the sixth speech project. Andrew Dlugan discussed it on November 1, 2009 in a post at his Six Minutes blog on Toastmasters Speech 6: Vocal Variety. Toastmasters International covers vocal variety in their very detailed manual on Your Speaking Voice (Item 199, 22 page pdf).

The National Communication Association has a 49 page pdf document called

The Competent Speaker Speech Evaluation Form  2^nd Edition 2007. Vocal variety is one of eight competencies considered in their evaluation:

“Competency Six: Uses vocal variety in rate, pitch, & intensity (volume) to heighten & maintain interest appropriate to the audience & occasion.”

    

Songs provide great examples of vocal variety, like the soaring electropop of Something Just Like This. Using vocal variety also can spice up a potentially boring subject like a weather forecast. The National Weather Service has an eight-minute YouTube video by Brooke Bingaman on Creating Vocal Variety.  

Four questionable quadrants for vocal variety

In Chapter 11 of his 2014 book, How to Deliver a TED Talk, Jeremy Donovan showed a chart with four quadrants for rate and volume. But he didn’t provide a reference for its source. Back on November 11, 2010 Rory Vaden had a blog post at Southwestern Consulting on 4 Voice Quadrants.with some different titles. A November 21, 2011 article by Cal Habig on Vocal variety in preaching: an important part of influence discussed Vaden’s blog post with a four-slice pie chart.  

Does your speaking voice sound too robotic?

Perhaps you should vary both your pitch and speaking rate. Yesterday at Computerworld there was a brief, humorous Shark Tank article titled To stop speaking to a real person, press 0. It said:

“The call center for this college's IT help desk has one particular staffer who's really, really good at his job, reports a pilot fish in the loop.

‘He's calm, professional and succinct,’ fish says. ‘So much so, in fact, that one caller took him for a voice-response system and demanded to speak to a ‘real person.’
 
‘The caller would not accept the staffer's word that he was, in fact, a real person.'
 
'He continued to demand to speak to a real person until the staffer transferred the caller to his supervisor.’ “

An image of Robby the Robot came from Wikimedia Commons.

Does your speaking voice sound like a little girl?

On February 19th Laura Bergells blogged about What no one will tell you: your voice is distracting. She described a presentation where a woman speaker had a high, squeaky “Betty Boop” voice. Her delivery interfered with her message. 

Her post reminded me of a story my father told me when I was twelve, about one of his friends, a distinguished metallurgical engineer who unfortunately had a high-pitched voice for a man (and who I’ll refer to as John Jones).

Once John answered the telephone at dinner time and was asked, “May I speak with Mr. John Jones?” He replied “This is he.” The other party said, “No, I meant MISTER Jones, not Mrs. Jones. This is Western Union calling.”  Exasperated, he proclaimed something stronger than, “Gosh Darnit to Heck, this is Mr. Jones!” Then that person began to sing Happy Birthday to him, because he’d had been sent a singing telegram to celebrate that holiday.

When I was a senior in high school, John visited us. The technical story he told was so fascinating that I stopped noticing his voice pitch.

John told us about selecting materials for the teeth on the bottom of the scoop to a front end loader or bulldozer. Those teeth have to handle both sand and rocks. Sand is abrasive and will rub and wear away material. Repeatedly hitting rocks causes cracking at the surface, and the cracks can grow inward until a tooth breaks off.  An obvious solution to abrasive wear from the sand would be to make the teeth harder, so they would wear out less rapidly.

But if that’s all that is changed, then you just switch failure modes. The impact fatigue cracks were not a problem before because they grew so slowly that they just were worn away. When you just increase the hardness, the cracks can grow faster until the teeth now can break off rather than wear out. So, before you can raise the hardness, you need to change the impact fatigue behavior. 

John’s wife had another vocal problem. She enjoyed singing but was quite tone deaf. One rainy April day, her seven kids were in the basement family room. They were marching around in a circle, pretending that they were riding carved wooden horses on a carousel (or Merry-Go Round). She was providing the music by singing. Finally the youngest daughter could no longer stand it and piped up:

“Mommy, please stop singing. You’re making my horse sick!”

My siblings and I used the euphemism “making my horse sick” many times to friends, and we told them the story behind it.

The image of a little girl came from the Library of Congress. Images of the front end loader and wooden horses came from Wikimedia Commons.

Public speaking isn’t opera

Last week I saw a blog post by Allison Shapira about how public speaking is not opera. She pointed out two of the biggest differences. First, in public speaking you typically are responsible for creating your material. In opera you are interpreting words and music written by someone else. Second, a speech is like an enlarged conversation, while an opera is a performance. An opera singer seeks perfection, not just excellence. He or she is often is helped by a hidden prompter. Many aspects of public speaking are similar to opera though, as shown in the following table.

Therefore you can learn a lot about speaking from watching and listening to someone who has sung opera. When I joined Capitol Club Toastmasters I encountered Jim Poston, who had a Masters in Opera Performance from the Boston Conservatory.  He had been a TV news anchorman both in Laredo, Texas and Boise, Idaho. Jim told us some amazing Midwestern tall tales, including one about getting away with murder.

He’s a graduate student in Department of Communication at Boise State University, where he’s working on his second masters degree. Jim also is on the adjunct faculty of the department of Communication at the College of Western Idaho. This summer he’s teaching Fundamentals of Oral Communication.

The image of an opera singer is from here.

Punctuation and vocal variety

One advantage of speaking over writing is that we can convey tone via inflection and gestures. We even can use paired fingers to make “quotation marks” in the air when explaining an evil plan. In writing we just have to use punctuation marks or emoticons.

For example, a percontation point (like a backward question mark, as shown above) can be used at the end of a rhetorical question.

Chess has a vocabulary with six punctuation combinations for commenting on moves:

!! = Brilliant Move
! = Good Move
!? = Interesting Move
?! = Dubious Move
? = Mistake
?? = Blunder

In his Sheldon cartoons Dave Kellett occasionally has lamented that we need more punctuation marks to address everyday situations. Some of his are existing symbols with reassigned meanings like:

% = Only a tiny part of me could be considered glad.

//// = I build huge mental walls to block awkward truths.

Others are brand new symbols for:

Your ravings make no sense. I highly suspect you’ve been breathing paint fumes.

Don’t particularly want to know the answer.

To the Car! Quickly!

Punctuate your delivery!

In the October 29, 1982 issue of Marketing News, Thomas G. Cushing warned against falling victim to the Grandfather Clock syndrome:

“When you sit down in a room where there is a grandfather clock ticking, you initially hear it because it’s making noise, but after a while you don’t hear it anymore because it’s ticking at the same rate and same tone.”

If you get absorbed in what you are doing you may wind up speaking at a constant pace and boring your audience with a monotone drone. Instead you should punctuate your speech by varying both the pace and pitch. Lisa B. Marshall discussed it last year in this podcast.

Consider the difference between the following two signs outside of a tennis court:














One of my father’s college friends added the punctuation.

Would you buy a used car from these men?

First impressions based either on appearance or speech delivery may be dead wrong. In the photo from 1921 the man at front left is Albert Einstein. The hunchback to his right is Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a famous electrical engineer. The shifty looking character between and behind them is Nikola Tesla, another famous electrical engineer.
In college I remember how radically my classmate’s first impressions of the professor who taught them the introductory materials science course were revised after they attended a second class. Jack Low was short, gray-haired, and very soft-spoken. After the first class some even suspected he might be senile.
During the second class a student asked about the difference between two related concepts: the proportional limit and the offset yield strength. Jack put one foot up on a chair and spoke extemporaneously for five minutes about what, how, and why. He explained both concepts more clearly and in much more detail than was in the textbook. Jack concluded by noting that the superficially attractive idea of a proportional limit was much less useful to engineers than the easier to measure offset yield strength.
Later we found out that Jack had been doing research on metallurgy for a decade before we were even born, and also had been head of the metallurgy department at Penn State University.

In his memorial tribute from the National Academy of Engineering it was noted that:

“Jack Low played an exceedingly important leadership role in both the science and application of metal deformation and fracture through the years 1940 to 1977, a period when physical and mechanical metallurgy underwent a tremendous forward advance.

He has played a major role in that advance, both through his own research and through careful and diligent training of those students fortunate enough to have worked with him. His students particularly remember his low-key, but extremely penetrating review and critique of their work and ideas.
He was a recognized authority on the relationship between microstructure and fracture processes in structural alloys, and his publications on such topics as temper embrittlement, the role of inclusions and dispersoids, and cleavage processes in the fracture of high strength steels and aluminum alloys are universally cited.”

Where did uptalk really come from?

The stereotype that it is from 1980s California Valley Girls clearly is wrong. So, who should get the credit (or blame) for spreading it? There is evidence for far earlier use in the United States and Canada. Also, there is evidence for both Australia, and New Zealand, which I will avoid discussing in order to sidestep the controversy about which country had it earlier.

Uptalk has a history in the United States before the first use of the term in 1993. In a documentary called American Tongues (1987) you can watch the comedian Robert Klein describe how his Georgia in-laws “talk in questions.” There was a 14-page article in 1982 by Marvin Ching in American Speech magazine about “The Question Intonation in Assertions.” Mr. Ching gives numerous examples taken from the Memphis area. He also points out that on page 9 of his novel Marry Me (1976) John Updike describes Sally’s intonation:

“Her voice was lifting everything into questions again.”

The TV comedy show Rhoda(1974) featured Lorenzo Music as an unseen character heard over the apartment building intercom who often began a conversation with:

“Hello? This is Carlton? Your doorman?"

In his novel The Angry Ones (1960) John Alfred Williams has the black narrator point out that:

“Southerners have a way of making statements sound like questions.”

Similarly, in the February 8, 1995 Toronto Globe and Mail, Robert Fulford pointed out that “Uptalk has a long, long history?” He begins by noting that it is described by Jack Batten in the book Lawyers (1978). He also found a discussion deriding its use from a Waterloo County school board meeting back in 1901!

In closing, I note that there is a novel by Angela Thirkell called High Rising (1933) which is set in a mythical village located in the equally fictitious British county of Barsetshire. Presumably the railway station located there was known as the High Rising Terminal.

Is uptalk like totally terrible?

The 4th edition (2004) of the American Heritage Dictionary defines uptalk as:

“A manner of speaking in which declarative sentences are uttered with a rising intonation as though they were questions.”

That word was coined by James Gorman in a 1993 article in the New York Times. Uptalk is related to an earlier linguistic term, high rising terminal (HRT), although Mark Liberman pointed out that the detailed definition for that term likely is incorrect. Uptalk generally is dismissed as an affliction. For example, Diane Diresta said that:

“….This is a real credibility killer. Women will not be taken seriously with this vocal pattern. To speak with authority practice bringing the voice down at the end of a sentence. American intonation patterns use a downward inflection to declare or demand and a rising inflection to question or indicate uncertainty.”

Other speaking coaches like Lisa Braithwaite have expressed similar sentiments. In their book Essentials of Business Communication, Mary Ellen Guffey and Richard Almonte, (6th edition, 2009) say on page 297 that:

“Some speakers today are prone to ‘uptalk.’ This is a habit of using a rising inflection at the end of a sentence, resulting in a singsong pattern that makes statements sound like questions. Once used exclusively by teenagers, uptalk is increasingly found in the workplace, with negative results. When statements sound like questions, speakers seem weak and tentative. Their messages lack conviction and authority. On the job, managers afflicted by uptalk may have difficulty convincing staff members to follow directions because their voice inflection implies that other valid options are available. If you want to sound confident and competent, avoid uptalk.”

Uptalk serves some functions. One is to hold the floor and convey: “but wait, there’s more.” In a newspaper article Stephanie Marsh noted to the contrary that:

“New studies show that people who use uptalk are not insecure wallflowers but powerful speakers who like getting their own way: teachers, talk-show hosts, politicians and facetious shop assistants.”

How about a quantitative example? During a trial you might expect the highest-status judge would use almost no uptalk, the lawyers (prosecution and defense counsel) would use more, witnesses even more, and the low-status defendant the most. Is this how people behave? Bronwen Innes looked at the rates of uptalk (HRT) during the examination phases of the hearings for seven criminal jury trials held by the District Court in Auckland, New Zealand. Here are the uptalk rates she found:





















Note that witnesses used more uptalk than the defendant. Attorneys (prosecution and defense counsel) used the least uptalk, and the judge used it more than the attorneys. She concluded that:

“….although HRTs certainly have some association with power, it is more accurate to describe them in terms of discourse function, role, and goals than as a stable social attribute of speakers.”

Reality is more complicated than advice from speech coaches might lead you to believe.

Storytelling Know-How

Most public speakers can learn about gestures, vocal variety, and body language by watching storytellers. I just saw a recent DVD video by Rick Sowash about Storytelling Know-How for Teachers, Preachers, and Speech-ifiers. The Boise Public Library has a copy. He observes that most of us need to add more expression, to quit talking like we are on the telephone. You can download the accompanying discussion guide here.

Mr. Sowash is an Ohio character, mostly a composer and book author. In a newspaper interview he said:

"I've been a radio broadcaster, theater manager, innkeeper and a county commissioner in Richland County, Mansfield. I think I'm the only composer of classical music elected to public office in America."

You can view him presenting to a school audience from his Heroes of Ohio program here.

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!”