Cutting out Vim's chattiness...how easy is it?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

So I've got Mutt set up with vim as my editor of choice. it's not nearly 
as scary as people make it out to be, it's easy to get the hang of.

But I have a question, and unsure if I can do this easily. If I type a 
sentence, and then step through words, I get the charactter numbers. 
Like this four is six a  seven test 11, so how would I remove the 
numbers after it. It's counting the number of characters. Which I'm okay 
with. But I don't want it announced after every single word

Is there a quick way to sort this? If I'm going word by word to review 
what I've got, I want to just hear the words, not how many characters 
since the start of the file