10 Ways to Tell if You Talk Too Fast

Are you worried that you talk too fast? Is your daily word count enough to match a scrabble marathon? If so, then you may be one of those people who talks ways too fast. Read the following list and see if any of the points sound familiar.

1. Your Job – If your careers officer at school just couldn’t decide whether you should be a rapper, auctioneer, or a NASCAR commentator, it should have given you a clue. When how fast you talk, is dictating your future vocation in life, it might be time to start taking sedatives as a preventative medicine.
2. Holding Your Breath - Back in 2008, illusionist and magician, David Blaine, broke the world record by holding his breath for 17 minutes and 4 seconds. If you can keep talking without taking a breath, for the same amount of time, you should really consider contacting the Guinness book of records.
3. Achievements – When you can list among your achievements, reciting Lord of the Rings during a thirty minute train journey, you definitely need to contact Guinness. On second thoughts, it might be an idea to get someone else to make the call, phone lines just aren’t equipped to transmit that many words per second.
4. Nicknames – If, when you were a child, your parents affectionately referred to you as “our little machine gun”, it could be an indication that you talked too fast. Now, if as you get older you can count among your nicknames – rabbit, the speed-mister or motor mouth – it shouldn’t be hard to work out that you’re spitting out words faster than George W Bush dodges flying shoes.
5. What? - When you notice that, “What?” is usually the first response to anything that comes out of your mouth, and you haven’t said something shocking or provocative, it is a clear sign that you suffer from a severe case of info-dump. If it took ten hours to happen, and you took ten seconds to retell it, don’t be surprised if your audience is less than impressed.
6. Interpreter - Have you ever been asked if you need an interpreter by a customer service representative, or during a hospital visit – even though all the staff are speaking the same language as you? If you ever are asked, make sure you take them up on it. It should be fun to see the look of confusion on their face when they ask you what language you speak, and you tell them it is English.
7. Games - When you are always the first person picked to play Pictionary because you can name 500 objects, before the game has even been taken out of the box, you probably need to slow down. Word games are your forte, and the faster the better as far as you are concerned. Just remember that there are only so many words available, so leave some for the rest of us. OK?
8. Syllables -If you consider words like Antidisestablishmentarianism as monosyllabic, you need to double your dose of sedatives. When pronunciation is getting in the way of a good story, you may find that something gets lost in translation – namely anyone who is trying to decipher the barrage of sounds that have spewed from your mouth.
9. Sweat – At the end of a conversation if you are visibly sweating, suffering from exhaustion, or your throat is in fire, you need to pull in the reigns. You may have been talking so fast that you hadn’t noticed, but the rest of us don’t need to take a power nap after a chatting with friends.
10. Writers Cramp – If you notice that people tend to get writer’s cramp from taking notes when you chair a meeting, don’t assume that they are all suffering from early onset rheumatism. If after the meeting you find that each person has only written a single word,  don’t get angry either – it was probably the only way they could manage to write down a fraction of what you said.

Do any of these sound familiar? What? Could you repeat that? Slow down!! I couldn’t understand a word you said!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 at 11:40 am and is filed under phone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.