7 MASTER THE MEANINGFUL PAUSE

In an effort to regulate both the speed and rhythm of your speaking, you should embrace the momentary respite of a beat between well-selected words and phrases. Taking a breath, settling your gaze on the crowd with purpose and conviction, and inhaling sharply before uttering your next remark will imbue otherwise nondescript passages of speechwriting with the potency of expressive inflection. It may in this way be possible for you to cultivate a room-wide impression of dynamism and momentum amid a mess of unvarying banality – let the tempo and cadence of your speech embody an energy and zestfulness that its content plainly does not have. Regular pauses will furthermore expand the duration of your speech without the encumbrance of additional material. A five-minute address may be stretched to a weighty 10 or even 15 merely by the artful use of such breaks.