Use pace, pauses and volume so your key points stand out.
Arjun has a talk to give to a group of clinic managers. For his first complete run-through, he leans his phone against a pile of books in a meeting room and records himself.
When he listens back, he can't believe how fast he's going. While talking, he felt calm and unhurried. The recording sounds like the voice that rattles through the terms and conditions at the end of a radio advert. The sentence he cares about most, the one about Mondays, is over so quickly that he nearly misses it himself.
What you hear in your own head as you speak is often not what the room hears. Pace, pauses and volume are your main tools for telling an audience which parts of a talk count. When you use them deliberately, they do for a spoken talk what headings and bold type do for a printed page.
Nervous speakers tend to go faster. Adrenaline gives every moment a feeling of urgency, and a silent room pushes you to fill it. Nerves also distort your sense of time, so a speed that seems steady to you can sound hurried to the people listening.
Aim for a pace slower than your natural one. It should be clearly slower than chatting with a friend, though it should stop short of sounding strange. The people in front of you are meeting your material for the first time and need a moment to absorb each sentence. You have been through it dozens of times as you prepared.
Three moments need the slower pace most: your opening, any number you give and any key point. If you slow down at only those three, your talk will already sound more in control.
You can't judge your own speed reliably from the inside, and recording yourself is the only dependable check. Record the talk and play it back. Listen for the places you hurry, paying closest attention to the opening, the numbers and the key points, then take those places more slowly next time. Lesson 5.5, "Record, review and record again", gives a full routine for doing this.
Of all the delivery tools, the pause is the easiest to use and the one speakers use least. Think of a pause before and pause after each key point. The first one makes the audience lean in to hear what you will say next. The second gives them time to absorb the point before the next one arrives.
When Arjun records the talk a second time, he makes one change. He stops briefly before "Mondays lose almost twice as many appointments as any other day" and stops again once he has said it. Nothing else is different, and that sentence now comes across as the centre of the talk, which is what it is.
Many speakers avoid pausing because, from the front, silence seems to go on for a long time. Two seconds of quiet can feel endless to you while seeming ordinary, and often welcome, to the audience. They use the gap to think, to read the slide or to note something down.
Pauses are also useful when you move from one section to the next. A short gap between points, together with a signpost from Lesson 2.1, "Structures that work for most talks", lets the audience know one part is finished and a new one is beginning.
Your volume should let the person furthest from you hear without straining. In a meeting room for twelve, that might mean speaking only slightly above conversational level. In a training room or town hall with no microphone, you will need to project. Projecting means drawing your breath from lower in your body and directing your voice at the back wall instead of at the floor or the front row.
When a microphone is available, use it, even if you believe your voice carries well. It helps the people at the back, anyone with hearing difficulties and anyone following online. Right at the start, before your first point, ask someone sitting at the back to give you a signal if they can't hear.
Volume and pitch also let you mark emphasis. A sentence delivered a little louder or a little quieter than those around it stands out, and a shift in pitch has the same effect. Someone who keeps the same volume and pitch for twenty minutes becomes hard to follow even when every word is clear, since nothing tells the audience what matters. Choose the points you most want remembered and change your volume and pitch there deliberately.
Questions usually end with the pitch going up, and firm statements usually end with it going down. Some speakers, nervous ones in particular, let statements end on a rise as well. You can call this rising pitch on statements. Take "We should trial this at two clinics?": the wording recommends something, but the sound is asking for permission.
Lots of people speak like this in everyday conversation, and there is nothing embarrassing about it. When your talk is making a case, though, it can make you sound less sure than you are. First, catch yourself when a statement ends on a rise. Then practise bringing your pitch down on the final word of your key sentences, especially your core message and your ask. A statement that ends on a fall sounds like you mean it.
To test this, take your core message from Lesson 1.1, "Say one thing your audience will remember". Say it two times, first letting it rise at the end and then letting it fall, and listen for the difference.
You don't need to fix all of this in one go. For most people, two changes bring the largest gain: slowing down and putting pauses around key points. Volume and pitch can follow after that.
To practise, pick the two minutes of your talk that hold your most important point and record them. Play the recording back and mark each place where you rushed and each place where a pause would help. Then record the same two minutes again.
Record yourself giving two minutes of your talk, mark where you rushed and where a pause would help, then record it again.
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