The method

How the coaching works

Good feedback is specific, honest, and actionable. Excolere combines two things a stopwatch and a gut feeling cannot give you on their own: hard numbers measured from your audio, and a judgment of your content against an evidence-based rubric.

What we measure

From your recording we compute the parts of delivery that are countable, so the feedback is grounded in what you actually did, not a vague impression:

• Pace in words per minute, compared to a natural conversational range.
• Filler and crutch words counted, so you can see the habit, not just feel it.
• Pauses, including the long ones, because timing is part of delivery.

How we judge the rest

The numbers cannot tell you whether your point landed. For that, your speech is scored across six dimensions drawn from classical rhetoric and communication science:

Structure

A clear opening hook, a main point, support, and a close.

Clarity

Clean, coherent sentences that are easy to follow.

Specificity

Concrete details and examples over vague generalities.

Persuasiveness

Ethos, pathos, logos, and rhetorical devices that land.

Conciseness

Signal over filler; economy of language.

Pace

Delivery tempo and the use of pauses, read from your audio.

Where the rubric comes from

It is not invented. Persuasion is judged with the tools Aristotle named, ethos, pathos, and logos. Structure draws on Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, a century-old framework for organizing a talk that moves people. And every result ends the way deliberate practice says learning should: with one concrete drill to try on your next attempt, so you improve a specific thing rather than just speaking more.

What it is, and is not

Excolere is a practice tool, not a human coach or a judge of you as a person. It is honest by design: a weak run gets a low score, because feedback that only flatters you cannot help you improve. Your audio is used to produce the coaching and then deleted automatically. The point is simple. Speak, see exactly what to change, and speak again.