My teachers suggested that I see a speech specialist   in school. I never really gave much thought to my speech. If other people understood what I was saying, then that was good enough. I didn't mind repeating myself many times. Before testing me, the speech specialist asked me what I thought of having good speech. I told her I thought it was not important. "Well, when you are in an interview for a job, and they don't know what you are saying, what are they going to say to you? Nice meeting you, bye," she said. Maybe good speech was important. I took part in 20-minute classes each week with the specialist. After she tested me, she told me that I spoke too fast, and didn't give enough eye contact  . I learned that when I made eye contact with someone, it meant that I was talking to that person, and I could also see what he or she thought about what I was saying. When my first speech class started, I found that I had been speaking too fast to be understood. Every time I spoke too fast, the specialist stopped me and told me to start again. At first, I got stopped after almost every other sentence. After a while, I felt my speech slow down. I wasn't sure if people could understand me better, but my friends stopped asking me to repeat myself. Speech is an important skill to have. If you do have good speech, that's a good thing, but if you don't have it, it is never too late to improve. From the sentence "but my friends stopped asking me to repeat myself," we know that   _  .
the writer's friends couldn't understand him the writer still couldn't make eye contact the writer improved a lot the writer didn't slow down