How fast should you talk in a pitch? A band, not a number

The short answer is 130 to 160 words a minute. That is StageMirror’s target, and anywhere inside it passes. The longer answer is that the band matters less than two things around it: counting your pace the way it is actually measured, and keeping it once you are saying words you have not rehearsed until they are automatic.

What is a good speaking pace in words per minute?

It is a band because voices differ, and so does what you are saying. There is no perfect figure inside it, and aiming for one exact number is a good way to sound like a metronome.

For a reference point, the National Center for Voice and Speech puts the average rate of speech for English speakers in the United States at about 150 words a minute. A study of large collections of recorded phone calls in English and Chinese, by Yuan, Liberman and Cieri, found that people talking with strangers tend to speak more slowly. That was conversation, not pitching, but a pitch is a talk to strangers.

Know what the band is not. It is a working target rather than a research finding: no study sits behind its exact edges, and it is not tuned to your voice. It also sits on top of a transcript. StageMirror transcribes with OpenAI’s whisper-1, and OpenAI’s model card for Whisper says accuracy differs across accents and that the model sometimes outputs words nobody said. When the transcript is wrong, your pace figure is wrong with it.

StageMirror’s programme turns pace into a pass-or-fail rubric item twice, in the milestone rubrics scored on the web. On Day 7, the pace item reads “Pace within 120–170 wpm”, a looser week-one bar. By Day 14 it is 130–160. Like every measured item, it is recomputed on the server from the stored analysis of your take rather than ticked by you.

Is talking fast in a presentation bad?

The usual advice is simply to slow down. The research is thinner and more mixed than that advice suggests.

In two field experiments with 449 participants, Miller, Maruyama, Beaber and Valone concluded that speech rate worked as a cue that made speakers seem more credible, and that faster speech made them more persuasive. It is one paper from 1976, and nobody should build a theory of pitching on it.

A 1995 study by Smith and Shaffer complicates it. Fast speech made listeners’ agreement track the strength of the arguments less closely, whether the topic mattered to them moderately or a lot. It raised agreement only among listeners for whom the topic was moderately relevant. An investor weighing your company is closer to the listener for whom it matters a lot, which suggests speed buys you little there and blurs the difference between your best point and your weakest.

Comprehension holds up better than you might expect. In a study published in 1970, Thomas Sticht played three short recorded passages about military activities to 280 Army inductees, then tested them with fill-in-the-blank questions on the facts. The normal recording ran at 165 words a minute. Sped up by machine to 206 words a minute, the passages were understood about as well, with no significant difference. At 275 and 300 words a minute, comprehension was significantly worse than for the same passages restored to normal speed. Those were recordings played in a classroom, not a founder on a stage, but they suggest listeners can follow speech well above 160.

There is still a case for the band. A pitch is close to the worst case for a listener. The material is new to them, it is dense with names and numbers, and they hear it once with no rewind. And a lot of delivery that sounds fast is made of ordinary-speed words with the full stops missing: one sentence runs into the next with no gap for the first to land. That is our reasoning rather than a research finding, but it is the part you can fix.

Slower must not mean flatter. A take can sit in the middle of the band and still sound recited if every sentence moves at the same speed. Slow down for the sentence that carries the point and move more briskly through the set-up; the average stays where it was. StageMirror also measures how much your pitch varies, from the audio, and raises a monotone flag, an estimate, when the typical swing in your pitch is less than 12% of its average (a coefficient of variation below 0.12). Treat it as a direction, not a verdict on your voice. Clearing it is one of the Day 14 rubric items.

How to measure your speaking pace

You need a recording and a word count. Any phone will do.

Fillers count as words. Any um that makes it into the transcript is part of your pace, so swapping one for a silent beat removes a word while keeping the time, which pulls the number down. Check the transcript, though: if it has tidied some ums away, your own count will run a little higher than StageMirror’s. How to stop saying “um” covers that swap in detail.

For a quicker check, read any printed paragraph aloud for thirty seconds, count the words and double the number. It is one of the steps in StageMirror’s Day 8 warm-up, which runs on the web and on the phone. Reading is not pitching, so treat the result as a calibration rather than your real figure.

How to slow down when you present

The most direct way to bring a fast take into the band is to put the full stops back, rather than to say each word more slowly.

Say you get through 480 words in 175 seconds without a real break. That works out at about 165 words a minute, above the band. Now add 8 full stops of 2 seconds each at the ends of sentences. The same words take 191 seconds: about 151 words a minute, inside the band. Nothing about how you say each word has changed. As a side effect, each of those stops is longer than 1.5 seconds, so each counts as a deliberate pause, and 8 of them in a take this length sits near the target of 2–3 a minute.

Pace only means something across takes if the words stay the same. Change the script and the number moves for reasons that have nothing to do with delivery. That is why Day 2 of StageMirror’s programme, “Inside the pace band”, asks for the same script as the day before. The day-by-day rehearsal plan covers the rest of the programme.

A fixed word count turns the band into clock times you can hit, and Day 2’s recording prompt asks you to hold them. Its warm-up’s counting ladder, a count to thirty at three speeds, has you feel both edges of the band first, on the web and on the phone.

Keep your pace on new material

A script you have said twenty times is the easy case. On Day 8, “Rebuild it on a spine”, the programme wraps the talk in a new structure, and the stated test is whether the pace band survives material you have never said in that order.

The joins between sections are the likeliest place to speed up, because that is where you are reaching for what comes next. If you can start cold from the middle, you know the structure rather than just the wording.

Day 9 does the same with pitch moves at the section breaks: its recording prompt tells you not to let them push you out of the band.

StageMirror’s pace is one figure for the whole take, so a rushed first minute and a slow last minute can average out inside the band. To find the fast stretch, listen. On the web, while the recording is still playable (7 days on the free plan), every word in the transcript is a button that jumps the recording to that moment, and the second pass of the three-pass review hides the picture so all you hear is your voice. Its voice check counts whether your pace landed in the band.

The least-scripted material you will ever speak is the question you did not see coming, which makes Q&A the likeliest place for a rehearsed pace to slip. Answer, then stop talking is about that part.

Progress means closer to the band, not a bigger number

StageMirror’s Progress screen, on the web and the phone, marks pace as improving when your latest take sits closer to the band than your first did. Say your first take ran at 185 words a minute and your latest at 160, right on the band’s top edge, which counts as inside. The number fell by 25, and the screen reports it as 25 closer to target.

Slow is out of band too. Dropping to 105 is as far off as rushing at 185, so do not overcorrect into a crawl. A take inside the band earns the “In the pocket” achievement.

Pace is a count of words over time. It can tell you that you rushed. It cannot tell you whether anyone in the room was persuaded, and no pace will close a round for you. Hold the band because it gives strangers time to hear each sentence, then spend the rest of your rehearsal on what the sentences say.