Why your voice is telling the room to stop listening

DRAFT for Fred to edit.

Listen to most project updates and you’ll hear the same pattern. Every sentence drops at the end. Down, down, down. It sounds like a list of separate, finished statements. And the room drifts.

A falling pitch says “I’ve finished”

When your pitch falls at the end of a phrase, listeners hear a completed thought. They relax. Linguists contrast this with the continuation rise: a held or rising pitch that signals more is coming.

In a meeting, the fall is also a cue. It tells people you’ve finished and they can take the floor. Drop at every full stop and you’re inviting people to talk over you.

The actor’s rule

Actors are taught that commas take an upward inflection because the thought is still alive, and full stops take a downward one to end it. Directors’ most common note is “get to the end of the line”.

For engineers, I put it like this: hold through the paragraph, land the point.

• Inside a paragraph, keep the ends of sentences held or slightly lifted. Keep the ball in the air.
• At the end, land it down on the point you want remembered.
• This is a held suspension, not a question. Your recommendation still lands. (See Tip 3: Land the last word.)

Try it

Read this aloud twice. First, drop every sentence. Then hold the first three and land the last.

The pump station has run for twenty years. Over the last six months it has failed three times. Each failure cost us two days of downtime. So we should replace it this year.

The first sounds like a list. The second sounds like an argument. Record both in the practice room and look at the pitch line.