Speaking drills: pace, clarity, fillers, and word economy

Delivery is the part of speech and debate that improves fastest with deliberate practice and slowest without it. These ten drills each take under ten minutes. Pick two per practice and rotate.

By Andrew Thomas, Charlotte Urban Debate League | Published May 6, 2025 | Updated September 2026 | 7 min read

Pace and clarity

The pen drill (5 minutes). Read a page of your case aloud with a pen held horizontally between your teeth. Then read it again without the pen. Articulation improves immediately because the drill forces your tongue and lips to work harder.
Metronome reading (5 minutes). Set a metronome app to 160 beats per minute and read one syllable per beat. Then 200. Then read at your natural pace; it will be clearer and more even.
The slow speech (5 minutes). Deliver a two-minute section of your case in three minutes. Exaggerated slowness teaches you where you rush.

Fillers and verbal tics

The click drill (5 minutes). Speak on any prompt for two minutes while a partner clicks a pen every time you say um, like, so, or basically. Count the clicks. Repeat with a new prompt; aim to halve the count. Most students go from twenty to five in a week.
Silence instead (3 minutes). Speak for one minute with a rule: whenever you feel a filler coming, close your mouth for one full second instead. Silence sounds like thought; um sounds like panic.

Volume and presence

Back wall (3 minutes). Deliver your first thirty seconds to a partner standing at the far wall of a classroom, without shouting. Support from the diaphragm, not the throat.
Three judges (5 minutes). Place three objects around the room and deliver a speech giving each one a full sentence of eye contact in turn. Moving your eyes at sentence boundaries, not mid-sentence, is what judges read as confidence.

Word economy

Thirty-second summary (5 minutes). Explain your entire case in thirty seconds. Then twenty. Then ten. You will discover what your case is actually about.
Cut the qualifiers (5 minutes). Record a one-minute rebuttal, transcribe it, and cross out every "I think," "kind of," "sort of," "basically," and "essentially." Deliver the edited version. It is shorter, sharper, and sounds more certain.
One breath, one idea (5 minutes). Deliver a rebuttal with a rule: one idea per breath, one breath per sentence. Long sentences with three clauses lose judges; short ones land.

How to schedule them

New speakers: drills 1, 4, and 8 three times a week for a month. Debaters preparing for a tournament: drills 3, 9, and 10 in the final week. Speech competitors: drills 2, 6, and 7 daily. Use the practice timer for any drill with a time limit, and the prompt generator for the drills that need a topic.