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Your rate of delivery refers to how quickly or slowly you speak during a presentation. As with other verbal delivery skills, going to one extreme or another (in this case, speaking too quickly or too slowly) can hurt your delivery.

Consider the example of Louis, a student at Harvard University who had a very slow rate of delivery. While giving a talk during a seminar on music theory, he noticed that many of the students (as well as the teacher) seemed inattentive. He also became aware that those listeners who were paying attention began interrupting him—not with questions about the content of his speech but with queries about his next point. Clearly, they were trying to move him along, which probably meant they were irritated and distracted.

Do you fall into the “slow speaker” category? Do people tend to finish your sentences for you—during conversations or while you’re delivering a public address? Although people who try to finish your statements may seem rude, their behavior sends an important signal that you need to increase your rate of delivery. Fail to catch that signal, and you risk losing your audience’s interest and appreciation.

Of course, swinging to the other extreme—talking too fast—presents the opposite problem. Overly fast talkers tend to run their words together, particularly at the ends of sentences, preventing their audiences from tracking what they’re saying. Listeners often have a difficult time in this situation, not because they are disinterested or impatient but simply because they cannot comprehend what is being said. In the worst-case scenario, potentially interested audience members may transform into defeated listeners because of a fast talker’s verbal onslaught (see chapter 4: Listening Skills).

The guiding rule for achieving an appropriate rate of delivery is this: speak fast enough to keep your presentation lively and interesting, but not so fast that you become inarticulate. You can also ask a friend or relative to listen to you and give you feedback about your rate of delivery. Finally, resist any temptation to speed up your delivery to fit an overly long speech into the allocated time. Instead, shorten the content of the presentation.