The issue of developing soft skills (in particular, communication skills) among students of higher education institutions is currently relevant. The article considers features of oral and written speech of students as speech personalities; the correlation of the concepts “Speech portrait” and “Speech self-portrait” is presented; the connection between the concepts of “Communication skills” and “Speech self-portrait” is presented. The purpose of the article is to describe the typical features of speech of students of information technology, identified by the students themselves (norm and deviations). Speech self-portraits of students were used as the research material. The results obtained allow us to identify blocks of speech features that students focus on: speech comfort; the opposition of a typo (misprint)/spelling error; lexical features of speech. Completing this task also allows students to develop the skills of observing their speech and analyzing their speech behavior.