Fluency, coherence, and sustaining to the end
Three words, three different properties
- Fluent, coherent and sustains are all in the title, and they fail independently.
- Fluency is local — a property of sentences and of delivery: the speech moves, and nothing snags.
- Coherence is global — the parts belong to one text, and a listener can hold them together.
- Sustaining is temporal — the level at the opening is still there at the four-minute mark.
- A speech can be fluent and incoherent — every sentence lands and the audience cannot say what it was about. Diagnose which has failed before revising, or you will polish what already worked.
Writing for the ear
- A sentence that reads well can be unsayable. The test is whether you can say it once, in one breath, without starting again.
- One idea per sentence, with the subject early, and no nested clauses: anything needing a bracket on the page needs a separate sentence in the room.
- Keep the important word at the end — it is where the voice falls and the attention rests. Vary sentence length: a short sentence after three long ones is the cheapest emphasis available aloud.
- Round your numbers. About a third is heard; 31.4 per cent is heard as noise unless the exact figure is the point.
- Referents are the commonest fluency fault, because the writer knows what it refers to and the listener has no way to check. The rule aloud is stricter than in writing: repeat the noun. Circle every pronoun and ask whether a listener hearing it once could name what it points at; if you hesitate, they cannot.
Coherence is not staying on topic
- A speech that never leaves its subject can still be incoherent, because coherence is about whether the parts belong to one text, not to one topic. Four things must stay constant:
- Person and tense. Moving between I, we, you and one forces the listener to relocate.
- Distance — the eyewitness, the researcher, the advocate. A section switching from I watched to studies show has changed who is speaking.
- Register. One conversational movement inside a formal speech is a lapse.
- Purpose — describing, arguing or proposing. A descriptive movement dropped into an argument is where most speeches lose coherence, because it feels relevant and does no work.
- The belongs test: why is this here now? If the answer is because it is about the same subject, it does not belong yet.
- Coherence is achieved by deletion. The instinct is to add links — this connects to my earlier point — which makes it worse twice over: padding, and an announcement that the speech failed to make the connection.
Where a speech sags, and the count that locates it
- Sustained is not the same as consistent. A uniformly average speech is consistent and not sustained.
- The cause is procedural, not attitudinal. You draft, revise and rehearse from the top, so after five passes the opening has had five and the ending one. Two fixes: revise backwards, working on the final movement first, and rehearse from the middle.
- The objective locator. Vagueness is what a speaker produces when the material runs out, and it is measurable before it is audible. Split the speech into thirds by time and count the concrete details in each — numbers, names, dates, places, objects.
- A sustained speech is roughly level across the thirds. A falling count locates the sag before you can hear it.
- The repair is material, not language. Rewriting vague sentences more elegantly leaves the count unchanged. The final third needs facts you have not used yet, which means holding your second-best specific back.
- In delivery, energy decays in a fixed order: pace variation flattens, pauses disappear, then volume drops on the last words of each sentence. The fix is written cues on the late cards, not willpower.
Worked Example
Worked Example
A student's five-minute speech argues that their town should finish its half-built pump track. The teacher says it loses its way in the second half. Locate the fault precisely and repair it.
Answer:
Step 1 — count the concrete details by third. 11, then 5, then 1. The count falls off a cliff at 3:20: the teacher heard the speech lose its way, and the count says the third movement is carried by one fact and four assertions.
Step 2 — read the third movement and confirm.
Five sentences, one fact, four assertions, and every assertion could have been written before the research. Escalation is the symptom — more than a track is what a speaker reaches for when the material has run out. Note the referent too: it in the second sentence could be the track, the decision or the delay.
Step 3 — repair with material, not language. The student has specifics they never used: $41,000 left in the allocation, and fencing hire at $140 a week for twenty-six months.
| Old sentence | Replacement |
|---|---|
| It matters to a lot of young people | Two Year 8s ride the half that exists. They turn round at the fence. |
| It is about more than a track | We have paid a hundred and forty dollars a week, for twenty-six months, to fence off a pile of gravel. |
Step 4 — recount. The final third now holds 7 details against eleven and five.