I had a public speaking course as part of my required gen. ed curriculum for transfer to my current school. I don’t know how common or uncommon this is as a requirement. But it definitely helped me tremendously in learning how to prepare for and deliver a decent presentation.
Really fucking excellent speakers include profanity.
Remember that skit on SNL with the two women on NPR? They’d speak in a flat monotone and occasionally inject an “I’m excited” in the same tone. Funny stuff. Know why it was funny? And for that matter, exciting? Because it was performed by two talented comediennes, and it was written by a top comedy writer. And it had a point. Even then, they kept it to under 3 minutes.
Those reasons were completely ignored by a couple of women that I used to work with. They’d give presentations while immitating that skit. It would be cute at first, seeing them trying to be funny. But when the presentation was an hour long and about profit margins, well…
I’ll let you come to your own baseball bat, er, conclusion.
Everyone stutters and uses pause fillers in speech. Yes, there are people who use a lot more of them, but every single one of you will use “um”, “y’know”, “uh” or restart sentences. Transcripts of speeches are always cleaned up because it’s definitely hard to read what was said when the filler words are included.
I taught computer courses for a year at one of those multinational big box computer learning places. I have to hand it to them, their crash course in public speaking was pretty good. One exercise was that everyone had to teach 15 minutes in front of the other instructors, who each had a bell. Each time you used a filler while speaking, they rang the damn bell. Twenty bells going off made you VERY aware of using “er,” “um,” and “you know,” and went a long way to breaking the habit.
Pauses while you’re looking for the right word in front of a room full of people only *seem *to take forever, and piss people off less than saying “you know” every five seconds.
Not everyone. As was mentioned, some people get trained out of it.
At the meeting I mentioned in post #23, we got a good lesson in contrasts. While the NPR ladies bored the living shit out of us, earlier in the day we had a professional motivational speaker. He was such a straight shooter who knew exactly what he was going to say next, it was a pleasure to hear him speak. And he got us all pumped and rowdy.
There’s nothing like a great speaker.
He can’t do that 100% of the time*. I’ve been reading “Um… : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean” by Michael Erard. One of the main points of the book is that everyone stumbles verbally. Everyone. Even fantastic speakers. It’s part of being human. Even Sign Language has signs that are pause fillers.
If the pause fillers are not excessive, you filter them out and don’t even remember that the person said them. I bet your motivational speaker probably had at least a handful in his presentation.
- Man, you actually get motivated by “motivational speakers”? What a wiener! :: points and laughs ::
You can train yourself out of a lot of them, though. Especially when you are prepared.
When I am calling a company, for example, I have in mind already what I need to say and the most efficient way to say it. I have a speech planned, and I can adjust it or customize it sometimes. Sure, I use speechfillers but make a concerted effort not to.
These are people who just don’t plan. These are the same people who drive down the same road every frickin day and every frickin day are taken aback that their turn has come up so fast. They are the ones who are never ready for their exit. Who always end up making a difficult left turn out of a gas station because they never plan ahead.
I got that training in the Army, sans bells. It was pushups instead. You’d give a speech on a topic assigned to you 10 minutes before. I personally had to give a brief on the Iran-Iraq war. For every stutter word, you had to do 2 (3? 4?) pushups.
Naturally, when you have 10 minutes to prepare, you’re have to speak extemporaneously so there will be pauses where you have to mentally plan the next paragraph. The lesson: If you have to pause, SHUT THE HELL UP until you’re ready.
Now if only I can stop my hands from punctuating.
Heh. I wonder which method was more effective.
No, you can train them all out, and use alternative, non-stupid fillers for when you need a moment to speak, rather than standing around like a cow chewing cud.
When I worked in sales, I used to ask people, “Do you have a pen and paper ready?” You’d think people would understand that they needed paper to go along with their pen for writing things down, but that would be an untrue assumption.
I’m so going to use that.
I think the point is not that everyone uses fillers and dead air sounds, but that some people use them so sparingly that you don’t even notice, and some people use them so often that you don’t notice anything else.