The Voice and Diction of Conversation : Page 71

The caution not to drop syllables requires the counter-caution not to spell out every syllable. This leads to a sort of prissy diction, a particularly painful fault. Persons who have suddenly reformed their speech habits are especially liable to this form of overdoing careful pronunciation. The point to remember is that only the accented syllables should get the full rich vowel value, and only the important words in a sentence should get any force or time. The others, while they should not be slurred or dropped, may very well be spoken rapidly and inconspicuously. Even the unimportant words should be spoken rapidly and unemphatically, with little value on the vowels. In, "What do you want for dinner?" only the words "What" and "dinner" are significant. Therefore, "do you want" must be spoken unemphatically, that is, rather quickly, without any lingering value on the vowels.