HR›Kurums Speak›№06 Pace
Kurums Speak · №06 · PACESpeed is not the problem. Speaking without pauses is.
Pace, pauses and filler words are one skill seen from three angles: how you use time when you speak. This guide gives you real numbers for speaking rate, a simple pause system and a research-backed way to bring "um" under control, with three drills.
In 30 seconds
- There is no single correct pace. Recorded phone conversation averages around 196 wpm; clear presenting usually sits nearer 130–160 wpm.
- Pauses matter more than raw speed. Use three lengths: a short beat, a sentence pause and a long "paragraph" pause.
- "Um" and "uh" are normal words that signal a delay. The goal is control, not zero; one study found up to about five per minute did not hurt ratings.
- The method that works in studies is simple: become aware of your fillers, then replace them with a silent pause.
Key takeaways
- Measure your own words per minute twice: once reading, once speaking off the cuff. The gap tells you a lot.
- Most speakers speed up under stress, so plan your pace for the moment you feel nervous, not for rehearsal.
- A two-second pause before a key point is the cheapest emphasis tool you have.
- Fillers cluster at the start of answers and at transitions; script your first sentence and your transitions.
- Verbal tics such as "so", "like", "basically" and "you know" are fine in moderation; repetition is what listeners notice.
"Slow down" is the most common piece of speaking feedback in business, and one of the least useful. Speaking slowly can sound hesitant. Speaking fast can be perfectly clear if the pauses are in the right places. And telling someone to stop saying "um" without giving them anything to do instead usually makes them more anxious and less fluent.
This guide is part six of Kurums Speak, our series on business speaking and diction. It treats pace, pauses and filler words as one skill: how you spend time while you talk. You will find what the research actually says about speaking rates, how to measure your own, how to use pauses deliberately, and a step-by-step method for reducing fillers that has been tested in controlled studies. The drills are short enough to fit between meetings.
How many words per minute should you speak?
Many articles quote a single "ideal" speaking rate. The honest answer is a range, and it depends on what you are doing. Here is what the better sources say.
- Natural conversation is faster than people think. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the Switchboard corpus of American telephone conversations and found an average of about 196 words per minute across total conversation time, with individual conversations ranging from about 111 to 291 wpm. Excluding silences, the rate was about 236 wpm.
- Clear, intelligible speech is usually slower. Baruch College's Tools for Clear Speech program, which coaches multilingual professionals, describes the average English speaker as speaking at about 150 wpm, suggests aiming for about 140 wpm when clarity matters, and gives examples of clearly understandable speech from about 120 to 165 wpm.
- Audiobook narration is a useful benchmark for read-aloud material. ACX, Audible's production platform, states that most performers narrate about 9,300 words per hour, which works out to roughly 155 wpm.
- Presentation textbooks often cite 120 to 150 wpm as a normal conversational range for public speaking, and note that no single rate is ideal.
You may also see the figure "150 wpm" attributed to the National Center for Voice and Speech. It is widely repeated on speaking-coach sites, but we could not locate the original NCVS page, so treat it as an often-cited approximation rather than a measured standard.
For business purposes, a practical rule: 130 to 160 wpm works for most presentations and explanations in English; faster is fine for casual exchanges with colleagues who share your context; slower is wise for complex numbers, non-native audiences and bad news.
How do you measure your speaking pace?
You need two numbers: your reading rate (prepared text) and your talking rate (unscripted). They are often very different, and the gap is useful information.
The timer method for reading rate
Take a passage of known length, for example the first 150 words of your next presentation script. Read it aloud at the pace you would use for a real audience while a stopwatch runs. Divide the word count by the time in minutes. 150 words in 60 seconds is 150 wpm; in 75 seconds, it is 120 wpm.
The recording method for talking rate
Baruch College suggests a simple process: pick a prompt you can answer for about one minute, record yourself, transcribe it with a speech-to-text tool, and count the words. Repeat with different prompts, because your rate shifts with the topic. Good prompts for professionals: "Explain what your team does to a new hire", "Summarize last quarter's results", "Describe a problem you solved this month."
Most video-call platforms and phones now offer transcripts, which makes this much faster. Copy the transcript of a real meeting where you spoke, count your words in one long answer, and divide by the duration of that answer.
The one-minute pace check
5 minPractice drill
- Paste the first 150 words of any presentation or report into a document. Read it aloud at your presenting pace while timing yourself. Write down your reading wpm.
- Set a one-minute timer and answer, without notes: "What is the biggest challenge in your job right now, and what are you doing about it?" Record it on your phone.
- Transcribe the recording (most phones and meeting tools do this automatically) and count the words. That is your talking wpm.
- Compare. If your talking rate is more than about 40 wpm above your reading rate, you are likely rushing when unscripted.
- Read the 150 words again, this time hitting a target of 140 wpm (about 64 seconds). Notice what you have to do differently: usually it is longer pauses, not slower words.
Repeat monthly. One number from one day tells you little; a trend tells you a lot.
Why do you speak faster when you are nervous?
Speed-up under pressure is extremely common, and it has a few separate causes. Knowing which one applies to you tells you what to fix.
- Arousal. Stress raises breathing rate and muscle tension. Short, high breaths make long, paced phrases harder, so speakers cram words into the air they have. Speech therapists describe fast speech in high-stakes moments as often being a symptom of anxiety rather than the root problem.
- Fear of silence. A one-second pause feels like five seconds to the speaker. Many people rush to fill it, which removes the pauses that made them understandable.
- Over-preparation. If you have rehearsed a talk twenty times, the words come out on autopilot. The material is old news to you, so you unconsciously hurry through it. The audience is hearing it for the first time.
- Too much content. Ten slides in a five-minute slot forces speed. The fix is cutting, not talking faster.
- Habit. Some people speak fast everywhere. Family style, culture or a first language with a faster rhythm all play a part. That is not a fault, but in a second language it costs clarity.
The practical consequence: plan your pace for the nervous version of you. If you rehearse at 140 wpm, you may deliver at 170. Building generous pauses into your notes gives you room to absorb that speed-up.
In the meeting room · The five-minute investor slot
A founder has five minutes to pitch at a demo day and rehearses at 165 wpm to fit twelve slides. On the day, adrenaline pushes her to well over 190 wpm and the room loses the numbers. For the next event she cuts to seven slides, rehearses at 140 wpm, and marks a long pause before each of three key figures. Delivered under pressure, the talk comes in at roughly 155 wpm and finishes on time, and the questions afterwards are about the figures she paused on.
What are the three kinds of pause, and when do you use each?
Diction training traditionally treats the pause as part of speech, not an absence of it. A simple three-level system, modeled on written punctuation, works well for business speaking.
One reason pauses help: listeners need time to process. A study in PLoS ONE by Corley and Hartsuiker found listeners recognized a word faster when it came after a delay, whether that delay was filled with "um", silence or a tone. The authors concluded that any delay before a word can aid recognition. In other words, the benefit comes from the pause itself, which you can get without the "um".
The rhetorical or "power" pause
A deliberate long pause before a key point builds anticipation; a pause after it gives the point time to land. Use it sparingly, two or three times in a ten-minute talk. Overused, it becomes theatrical.
| Pause | Mark | Length (approx.) | Written equivalent | Business use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short beat | / | about a quarter to half a second | Comma | Between items in a list; before a number; a quick top-up breath |
| Sentence pause | // | about 1 second | Full stop | End of each sentence or thought; lets the listener file it |
| Long pause | /// | 2 seconds or more | Paragraph break / heading | Between sections, after a key result, before a question to the room, after a slide change |
| Power pause | /// before or after | 2–3 seconds, deliberate eye contact | Bold or italics | Before the main recommendation, after a striking figure, before the ask |
Durations are practical guides for presenters, not research norms.
Pause-mark a paragraph
4 minPractice drill
- Read the practice lines aloud once at your normal pace and record them.
- Read again observing every mark: / short beat, // one second, /// two seconds or more. Count silently "one-and" for a second if you need a guide.
- On the long pauses, look up from the page as if at an audience.
- Compare the recordings. The second will almost always sound more confident, even though it is slower.
Last quarter / we closed forty-two new accounts. // That is our best result / in three years. ///
We looked at three options: / build, / buy, / or partner. // We recommend /// partner.
Before we go on, / I want to be clear about one thing. /// This delay is our responsibility. //
The pause before "partner" is a power pause; let it feel slightly too long.
What do filler words like um and uh actually do?
Fillers are not random noise. In a widely cited 2002 paper in Cognition, psychologists Herbert Clark and Jean Fox Tree argued that "uh" and "um" are genuine English words with conventional meanings. Drawing on large corpora of British and American conversation, they found that speakers use "uh" to announce a minor upcoming delay and "um" to announce a major one. In their main British corpus, a pause followed "um" 61% of the time versus 29% for "uh". They also observed that speakers produce fewer fillers in formal settings, which suggests fillers are at least partly under control.
Fillers also do social work. They tell the listener "I'm still talking, hold on", which helps keep the floor in a lively meeting. That is why they rise when you feel you might be interrupted, and why they are especially common on calls, where you have fewer visual cues about whether others are waiting to speak.
So should you eliminate them?
No. The goal is control, not zero. A 2024 study in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis by Laske and DiGennaro Reed played listeners speeches containing 0, 2, 5 or 12 fillers per minute. Higher rates, especially of filler sounds like "um", lowered ratings across most measures, with the strongest effect at 12 per minute. A rate of 5 per minute did not significantly reduce perceived effectiveness. Separately, an Interspeech 2023 study from KTH Royal Institute of Technology found that speech with filled pauses was rated as less confident, though not less competent overall.
The takeaway: a few fillers are invisible; a stream of them costs you perceived confidence. Aim for fewer than about five per minute in a presentation, and do not worry about the occasional "um" in a conversation.
Pro tip
Fillers are most damaging at the start of an answer, where they read as uncertainty, and right before a number, where they read as doubt about the number. If you fix only two places, fix those.
How do you stop saying um?
The most rigorously tested method comes from behavior analysis and is called brief habit reversal. It has two parts: awareness training and a competing response. In a 2020 study in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Pawlik and Perrin had four college students watch videos of their own talks and count their fillers, then practice pausing silently instead of saying "um" or "uh". All four reduced their fillers, and for one participant the improvement carried over to a real class presentation. The samples in these studies are small, but the approach is simple and low-risk.
The method, adapted for work
- Awareness. Record a real meeting contribution or a practice answer. Count every "um", "uh" and repeated tic. Divide by minutes. That is your baseline.
- Catch it live. For a week, simply notice fillers as they happen, without trying to stop them. Many people find the count drops just from noticing.
- Replace with a pause. When you feel an "um" coming, close your mouth and pause instead. Silence feels long to you and sounds normal, even thoughtful, to the listener.
- Slow your transitions. Fillers cluster at the joins between ideas. Slow down at "Next", "The second point", "So what does that mean?" and let a full pause separate sections.
- Script your first and last sentences. Starting cold invites "Um, so, basically...". Know your opening line word for word, and your closing line.
- Get an external counter. Toastmasters clubs assign an Ah-Counter at each meeting, who notes overused fillers such as "ah", "um", "er", "so", "well" and "you know" and reports them during evaluations. A colleague can do the same for your next team presentation.
Filled
Um, so, basically, uh, what we're seeing is, um, that churn went up, like, quite a bit, you know, in September.
Paused
What we're seeing / is that churn went up / by three points / in September. //
Sixty seconds, zero ums
6 minPractice drill
- Write five everyday work prompts on cards, e.g. "Explain a recent decision", "Describe your team's biggest risk", "Summarize a customer complaint".
- Pick one at random. Before speaking, take a breath and close your mouth. Start only when you have your first sentence.
- Talk for 60 seconds and record it. Every time you feel a filler coming, stop and pause silently instead.
- Play it back and count fillers. Note where they cluster: openings, transitions or searching for a word.
- Repeat with a new card. Aim to halve your count over a week, not to hit zero on day one.
If a colleague will help, ask them to tap the table each time you say "um". Awareness is the active ingredient.
What about so, like, basically and you know?
Beyond "um" and "uh" there is a second family of fillers: discourse markers and hedges. Words like "so", "like", "basically", "actually", "right?", "you know" and "I mean" all have real jobs in conversation. Research by Fox Tree and Schrock in the Journal of Pragmatics proposed, for example, that "you know" invites the listener to fill in what you mean, while "I mean" warns that you are about to adjust what you just said.
Problems start when one word becomes a tic: every answer opens with "So,", every sentence ends with "right?", every claim is "basically" something. Listeners stop hearing the content and start counting the word. In business settings, some markers also send unintended signals:
- "Basically" and "just" can sound dismissive ("it's basically just a pricing issue") or minimize your own work.
- "Like" as a filler reads as casual; fine in a stand-up, risky in a client pitch.
- "I think", "kind of", "sort of" soften claims. Useful when you are genuinely uncertain, but stacking them ("I kind of think we should maybe...") undermines a recommendation.
- "Right?" and "you know?" at the end of sentences can sound like you are seeking reassurance.
- "To be honest" / "honestly" can imply you are not always honest.
The fix is the same as for "um": find your personal tic from a recording, then replace it with a pause or a cleaner word. "So" at the start of an answer can simply be dropped.
Common mistakes
- Swapping one filler for another ("um" becomes "so" becomes "right"). Replace fillers with silence, not with new words.
- Trying to reach zero fillers in conversation. Natural speech has some; chasing zero makes you stilted.
- Speeding up to avoid pauses, which creates more fillers at the joins.
- Hedging a recommendation so heavily that the listener cannot tell what you actually recommend.
How should your pace change in a pitch, a briefing or a difficult conversation?
Good speakers change gear. A single steady pace for an entire talk is almost as monotonous as a single pitch. Use the table below as a starting point, then adjust to your audience: slower for a large room, a non-native audience, a poor connection or dense numbers; faster for an informal team update among people who share your context.
Variation within a talk matters as much as the overall rate. Slow down for anything new, complex or important; speed up slightly for background, examples and material the room already knows. That contrast is what makes the important parts stand out.
| Context | Pace (rough) | Pause style | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales pitch / investor pitch | Moderate, 140–160 wpm; slower on key numbers | Power pauses before the ask and after the headline number | Rushing the close; filling silence after the ask |
| Technical or financial briefing | Slower, 120–140 wpm | Short beats before every figure; long pauses between sections | Reading slides; burying the conclusion |
| Delivering bad news | Slow and even | Long pause after the news; let the listener respond first | Rushing to the solution; nervous fillers and hedges |
| Q&A | Steady; slower for your first sentence | Pause before answering; repeat or rephrase the question | Opening every answer with "Um, so..." |
| Video call | Slightly slower than in the room | Longer pauses at turn-ends to allow for audio lag | Talking over others; long unbroken monologues |
| Team stand-up | Natural, brisk | Short beats; one clear pause before any blocker | Mumbling through the update |
Rates are practical guides drawn from the ranges discussed above.
In the meeting room · The restructuring announcement
A department head has to tell her team that two roles are being cut. In rehearsal she races through the news in one breath and jumps straight to the support package. On the day, she states the decision in two short sentences, pauses for a full three seconds, and lets someone ask the first question before explaining next steps. The slower pace and the silence signal that she takes the news seriously, and the team hears the support details because they are no longer in shock when she gives them.
How do you manage pace and pauses on video calls?
Video calls change the rules in three ways. First, audio is compressed and sometimes delayed, so fast speech and clipped consonants are harder to follow. Second, you lose most of the visual cues that tell you whether people are following or want to speak. Third, there is a short lag between when you stop and when others hear you stop.
- Slow down slightly compared with how you would speak in the room, especially for numbers, names and anything technical.
- Use longer pauses at the end of a turn. After asking a question, wait a full two to three seconds before filling the gap. Many people jump in with "um, so, anyone?" just as others were about to unmute.
- Signal structure out loud. "Three points. First... Second... Third..." gives listeners the map that body language would give in person, and gives you natural pause points.
- Expect more fillers. People use fillers to hold the floor, and on calls the fear of being interrupted is higher. Knowing this, replace "um" with a short "One moment" or simply a visible pause while looking at the camera.
- Keep monologues short. Break long updates into chunks and check in between.
Pro tip
Turn on live captions during a practice call with a colleague. If the captions struggle with your sentences, real listeners on weak connections will too. It is a free, instant clarity check.
How do you build a better pace habit in four weeks?
Pace and fillers change through repeated, short, measured practice, not through one big effort before an important presentation. A realistic plan for a busy professional:
- Week 1, measure. Do the one-minute pace check and record one real meeting contribution. Count fillers per minute. Write both numbers down.
- Week 2, awareness. Notice fillers live without trying to stop them. Do the pause-mark drill three times.
- Week 3, replace. Do "Sixty seconds, zero ums" daily. In real meetings, focus on one thing only: a silent pause instead of a filler at the start of your answers.
- Week 4, apply. Script the first and last sentences of your next presentation, mark pauses in your notes, and ask a colleague to act as Ah-Counter. Re-measure wpm and fillers and compare with week 1.
Persistent problems with fluency are a different matter. If you have repetitions or blocks you cannot control (for example, getting stuck on the first sound of a word), that may be stuttering rather than filler use, and a speech-language pathologist is the right person to see. Fillers as described in this guide are a normal part of fluent speech.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good speaking pace for a presentation?
For most business presentations in English, about 130 to 160 words per minute is comfortable for listeners, with slower stretches for numbers and key points. More important than the average is varying your pace and using deliberate pauses.
Is 200 words per minute too fast?
Not for casual conversation: recorded American phone conversations average close to 196 wpm. For presenting, technical content or a non-native audience, 200 wpm is usually too fast unless you pause generously between ideas.
Why do I say um so much?
"Um" signals that you need a moment to plan what comes next, and it holds the floor so others do not jump in. You will say it more when you are unsure of your next point, under time pressure, or worried about being interrupted, such as on video calls.
Can you completely stop saying um?
You can reduce it a lot, but zero is neither realistic nor necessary in natural speech. Studies suggest a low rate, around five or fewer per minute, does not hurt how listeners rate you. Awareness training plus replacing fillers with silent pauses is the method with the best evidence.
Kurums Speak · the series
Keep practising: more from Kurums Speak
Stress and Intonation: How Emphasis and Vocal Melody Change What Your Words Mean
How word stress, sentence stress and intonation change meaning at work: commonly mis-stressed business words, five ways to create emphasis, uptalk, monotone fixes and script markup drills.
How to Sound Better on Video Calls: Microphones, Diction and Presence on Zoom and Teams
Bad audio makes experts sound less credible. Choose and place a microphone, fix room echo, set Zoom and Teams audio correctly, handle lag and look present on camera.
How to Overcome Fear of Public Speaking: An Evidence-Based Plan for Presentation Nerves
How common fear of public speaking really is, what nerves do to your body, and an evidence-based plan: reappraisal, a breathing reset, an exposure ladder and a first-90-seconds script.
Best Public Speaking Courses and Speech Coaching Apps in 2026: Yoodli, Orai, Toastmasters and More Compared
Ten public speaking courses, clubs and AI speech coaching apps compared on price, feedback type and privacy, with a decision table and a four-week plan that combines them with free drills.
Articulation Exercises for Clear Speech: Consonants, Vowels and Mumbling Fixes
Where English consonants are made, why people mumble, and the articulation exercises that fix it: warm-ups, final consonants, numbers and acronyms, tongue twisters and when to see an SLP.
Diction for Business: How to Speak Clearly, Confidently and Persuasively at Work
What diction in speaking really means at work, the seven instruments of clear speech (breath to presence), a recorded self-audit and a 30-day plan you can run at your desk.
Sources and further reading
- Yuan, Liberman & Cieri, Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation — Interspeech, University of Pennsylvania (2006)
- Speaking Rate — Tools for Clear Speech, Baruch College, CUNY
- How long will my narrated audiobook be? — ACX Help Center
- Clark & Fox Tree, Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking — Cognition 84 (2002)
- Corley & Hartsuiker, Why Um Helps Auditory Word Recognition: The Temporal Delay Hypothesis — PLoS ONE (2011)
- Laske & DiGennaro Reed, Um, so, like, do speech disfluencies matter? — Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (2024)
- Pawlik & Perrin, Reducing speech disfluencies during public speaking using brief habit reversal — Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (2020)
- Kirkland, Gustafson & Székely, Pardon my disfluency: disfluency effects on perceived competence and confidence — Interspeech (2023)
- Fox Tree & Schrock, Basic meanings of you know and I mean — Journal of Pragmatics (2002)
- Ah-Counter — Toastmasters International club meeting roles
- Fast speech: Is it stress or habit? — WELL SAID Toronto Speech Therapy (2026)
- Adjust Your Speaking Rate — A Speaker's Guidebook (Macmillan Learning)
Kurums Speak takes its structure from the classic diction tradition, including Nüzhet Şenbay's Söz ve Diksiyon Sanatı (Yapı Kredi Yayınları), and applies it to business English. This guide is educational and is not a substitute for advice from a speech-language pathologist or voice specialist.
Last updated 29 October 2026 · Part of Kurums Speak
Discover more from Kurums | Business Intelligence
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
