Whether you're giving a keynote address for a major industry convention or have three minutes to make your case before angel investors who might give you that five-figure investment you need, knowing how to pace a speech or any public presentation is important for good business form. Follow these speech pace tips to keep your time and to communicate your message effectively.
Public Presentations – Speeches, Pitches and More
You need to determine which type of speech you're giving to figure out how to plan out the speed of your presentation. For instance, is your public presentation:
- a PowerPoint presentation for sales?
- an uninterrupted speech for a certain period of time?
- a taped commercial or podcast?
- an audio tutorial or the audio to go with a video tutorial?
Pacing depends on the type of work you're doing. For speeches, spoken words at a moderate pace average about 1,000 words per seven minutes. This means that if you keep the cadence of your voice at optimal speed for audience understanding, you can read aloud 1,000 words in about seven minutes.
How to Pace a Speech
Use the 1,000 words per seven minutes to find your optimal speech length. You can average about 140 to 150 words per spoken minute, so use this as a multiplier for public presentations. A ten minute speech, then, would involve about 1,400 to 1,500 words.
If you plan to use jokes as part of the speech, you'll need fewer words as people will require time to laugh, then compose themselves before you continue. The same is true for speeches that require audience participation. If you will ask your audience to respond to questions, leave plenty of time for interaction. It is better to use fewer words and to speak slowly than to try to rush too many words and idea into a speech.
There are both risks and payoffs to audience interaction. If you plan to encourage participation, then you need a flexible pacing strategy. Prepare to be disciplined about keeping the speech on track if you get a lot of input, and be ready to fill in the empty space if you don't get enough input.
Practicing Speech Presentations
The standard advice for practicing speeches is to give the speech to yourself in a mirror, but with today's technology it's also important to use a voice recorder or a video camera (even a simple cell phone video camera) to record yourself giving the speech.
Not only will you be able to judge pacing and learn that your natural "moderate" pace is, say, 90 words per minute -- and you can therefore adjust pace or speech length -- but if you film yourself you can catch nervous tics, weird hand gestures, or funny faces you might make. People develop very subtle public presentation habits that are completely undetectable to the speaker unless you view yourself on video.
For more information on speeches, please read Fun Persuasive Essays and Speeches.
Erik Zoltan - Erik Zoltan has more than 20 years of computing experience working for large and small corporations such as ESI Technology, EDS, Inc. and ...
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