My AOE tanking sucks

[Navan]

If you stop and mark in PUGs

Download a marking mod, many people use LuckyCharms2 or you can do what I do and simply remap keys F5-F12 to be Star through Skull. This makes it incredibly easy to mark out everything exactly the same. F12, F11, f10, etc are all kill targets in descending order (skull, X, square) and F5, F6, F7, etc are CC targets in ascending order (star, circle, diamond).

[Chasey]

I know tanks get accused of being diva's, better than others...insert your name you have been called in a pug, but this is where we have to for the ease of the run and your own sanity. Mark at least skull and let the DPS know what cc target they have. When the healer is low on mana, call it out in party chat, "MANA" communication is the key. If by some grace of all thats holy you get a competent pug and your healers mana is almost always full. Speed up! Someone has to set the tone for the run, this is where a good tank can do this.

[Arcand]

Things I do that often help:

I have skull bound to Shift-W. You can hit that really fast to designate
kill targets. Some time is lost once a week when somebody asks you what
mod you're using to mark things so fast and you have to explain where
raid markings are in the Key Bindings section.

If you're delaying a pull, sit down or kneel. People understand that.
And if you target the healer, they probably have you targeted and will see
it; the smart ones will understand that you're paying attention to their
mana bar and will do something about it.

(The lame ones will irritably tell you to get moving, because it should
be obvious to you that even though they're at 15% mana they're ready to
go and prefer to use their emergency cooldowns rather than drink.)

[xstrykr]

If you stop and mark in PUGs

Download a marking mod, many people use LuckyCharms2 or you can do what I do and simply remap keys F5-F12 to be Star through Skull. This makes it incredibly easy to mark out everything exactly the same. F12, F11, f10, etc are all kill targets in descending order (skull, X, square) and F5, F6, F7, etc are CC targets in ascending order (star, circle, diamond).

I personally use a combination of SRTI and PugLax. For a while I tried Magic Marker but I couldn't seem to get it to automatically mark for me. I like SRTI because I can have my Vent PTT key down and still be marking with no problems, and it's just as fast as moving my hand off the mouse to hit a key that's on the other side of the keyboard.