hold the room.

Glossary

Prosody

The melody of your voice: how it rises and falls. A varied melody holds attention; a flat one loses it.

From the lesson

The toolbox you can actually control

Many people change their voice in exactly the wrong direction under pressure: faster, higher, flatter, with the ends of sentences trailing up or trailing off. The clearest map of what you can actually control has seven parts: register (chest or head), timbre (warmth), prosody (the melody), pace, pitch, volume, and silence.

Day 5 · The Voice People Lean Into: How to sound more confident when you speak: pace, pauses, and landing sentences

Pace, melody and the pause

Three of those do most of the work. Pace: comfortable, clear speech sits around 140 to 160 words a minute; nerves can push you faster, and rushed speech is harder to follow. Prosody: a voice that rises and falls holds attention; a flat one is easy to tune out. And the pause: one to two seconds of silence before a key point is one of the strongest tools you have. It feels like an eternity to you and like authority to everyone else.

Day 5 · The Voice People Lean Into: How to sound more confident when you speak: pace, pauses, and landing sentences

Where it comes up

Related terms

  • Lip trillBlow air through loosely closed lips so they flutter, like a motorboat, while you hum. It warms up your breath and voice together.
  • Vocal fryA creaky, rattling sound at the end of sentences when the voice runs out of energy. It can make you sound less competent.
  • UptalkEnding a statement with a rising tone, as if it were a question. It can make you sound unsure.
  • TimbreThe colour of your voice: warm, bright, thin or rich.
  • RegisterWhether you feel your voice more in your chest (deeper, fuller) or your head (lighter, higher).

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