How
to Minimize Um’s and Uh’s When Speaking
While it’s not necessary, and some
linguistic experts would say, even desirable, to eliminate all the um’s from
your everyday conversations (unless they’re excessive or clustered), you do
definitely want to minimize them in more formal settings where the stakes and
expectations are higher and your hemming and hawing could be a distraction. Too
many um’s and uh’s can irritate your listeners because you’re essentially
thinking out loud, and people want to do less thinking when listening to
someone and instead be carried along by your words. Constant delays prevent
people from getting lost in your rhetoric, and make them think, “Come out with
it already!” They also hurt your credibility with the audience because they can
make it appear you didn’t respect them enough to prepare adequately and decided
to wing it, and/or that you’re not confident in what you’re saying and don’t
know your stuff inside and out. Finally, a lot of um’s can signal dishonesty,
leading people to think you’re buying time to think of an excuse or alibi. All
in all, not the kind of impression you want to make.
Across the population, people use
fillers as little as 1.2 times per thousand words up to as many as 88 times per
thousand words. If you want to be the guy on the lower end of the scale, here
are some tips:
Limit distractions. Remember how an um can represent the junction between
planning what to say and executing it? Anything that adds to your cognitive
load while you speak increases the need for these pauses, as you’re not just
trying to think and speak at the same time, but are also distracted/feeling
emotional/working on some other task. The more you can concentrate on just
speaking, the less fillers you’ll use.
Don’t put your hands in your
pockets. Studies have found that when your arms
and hands are constrained, the amount of filler you use goes up, because you’re
unable to gesticulate and thus are less confident your message is getting
across.
Prepare rigorously. When giving a speech or presentation that can be planned
for beforehand, extensive preparation can minimize your use of filler. If the
information you wish to convey is fresh in your mind, a filled pause won’t be
needed to retrieve it. A couple of points that will be especially helpful here:
- The less constraints that are placed on what you can speak about, the more likely you are to use fillers. So narrow down your topic, and then narrow it down again.
- Concentrate on the transitions you’ll make. Transitioning from one topic to another in a speech is a dangerous time for the formation of um’s, because the task adds to your cognitive load. Plan out exactly how you will transition to and from each topic, and write these transitions on an index card you can glance at during your speech.
Tell a story. Um’s and uh’s naturally vanish once you get involved in
telling a story. And as a bonus, stories are some of the most persuasive and
memorable rhetorical tools you can employ.
Talk face-to-face if you can. The use of fillers goes up when you’re talking on the
phone. Because you don’t have body language and facial expressions at your
disposal, you struggle more in choosing the right words to convey what you
mean.
Try to relax and be less
self-conscious. Um-ers tend to describe themselves
as “unusually self-conscious” and apt to “worry quite a bit over possible
misfortunes” and thus unsurprisingly speak more slowly, carefully planning and
crafting what they are going to say. Instead of concentrating on what people
are thinking about you (and this advice works for a lot of things, folks) focus
on totally getting into what you’re doing. Instead of pausing, just keep
charging ahead, talking a little faster than you normally do and letting
your sentences roll together. You’ll choose the wrong word more often and have
to restart your sentences more frequently, but stylistically, the audience will
find your speech more fluid, engaging, and forward-moving.
If you need help lowering your
inhibitions, researchers have found that after 19 beers, the average person
stops saying “um” and “uh.” They also stop saying many other words that are
comprehensible, of course.
Keep your sentences simple and
short. The longer the sentence, the more
likely you are to fall into filler. And shorter sentences make you sound
clearer and more forceful, confident, and manly to boot. To keep your sentences
simple and short:
- Use more simple declarative sentences. Subject. Predicate. Period. Drop the unnecessary clauses and conjunctions and get right to the point. Take it from E.B. White: “There isn’t any thought or idea that can’t be expressed in a fairly simple declarative sentence, or in a series of fairly simple declarative sentences.”
- Get rid of other fillers such as: “sort of,” “like,” “ya know,” “okay,” “right,” “so,” “well,” “stuff like that,” “kind of,” and “I mean.” If it’s extraneous to the meaning of the sentence, leave it out.
- Use less hedge words and phrases, such as “hopefully,” “probably,” “possibly,” “quite,” “relatively,” “reasonably” and “fairly,” and don’t say things like, “I was just wondering…” “I was thinking…” “I don’t know but…”
Hedge words and fillers are often
used to weaken and soften a sentence when someone is afraid they might be wrong
and/or want to tread lightly. They sometimes can be helpful when you’re
trying to be diplomatic (and are useful in emails when you only have words to
convey meaning), but many times it’s better to plainly put your idea out there
and be assertive.
Now
a Note on What Not to Do
You may have heard that the best way
to get rid of your um’s and uh’s is to replace them with a silent pause. This
is public speaking dogma; you’ll find it in practically every public speaking
book out there. And it certainly makes sense on the face of it. A silent pause
sounds dignified and noble while an um sounds uncertain, right?
Wrong, as it turns out.
In a study done with college
students, the students were first asked about their perception of people who
frequently say “um” and “uh.” Not surprisingly given the cultural bias against
ummm-ing, the students rated um-ers as “uncomfortable, inarticulate,
uninteresting, ill-prepared, nervous, disfluent, unattractive, monotonous,
unsophisticated, and lacking in confidence.” Ouch!
The students were then asked to
listen to three different edits of a recording of a man’s call-in commentary on
a radio show. In one version, the man’s um’s were left in. In another, the
man’s um’s were replaced with silent pauses. In the third version, the pauses
were removed altogether so that the man’s words flowed together.
The result? The version without any
pauses at all was rated the best. But the verison with silent pauses was not
ranked any higher on quality than the version with the um’s; the silent pauses
did not improve people’s perception of the speaker’s eloquence. And, in
fact, the man in the version with the silent pauses was rated has having more
anxiety than the man who um-ed.
Bottom line: Minimizing all
unplanned pauses (a purposeful dramatic pause can be an effective rhetorical tool)
can boost your eloquence. But don’t worry about trying to replace your um’s
with silent pauses; it doesn’t improve your speech, not to mention the fact
that the stress from the effort may make you sound worse than just relaxing and
letting a few um’s sneak in there.
Take
Heart Ye Um-ers: A Final Tip
Even if none of the um-minimizing
techniques mentioned above are able to help you keep your ummm-ing in check,
there’s still something you can do to come off as well-spoken to others:
concentrate on always making the content of what you say outstanding.
In the study just described, the
students were broken into three groups before they listened to the recordings.
One group was told to only focus on the content of the recording. Another was
told to only focus on the style. And the third was given no instructions (the
control).
When listening to the recording in
which the um’s had been retained, those who paid attention just to the style of
the man’s speech noticed them, while those who focused on the content largely
filtered them out.
And now we get to the crux of the
stigma that surrounds um-laden speech. If you find yourself noticing um’s as
someone speaks, chances are it’s because you’re focusing on the speaker’s style
instead on his content, and the reason you’re doing that is because the content
isn’t very interesting and worthy of attention. As the author of the study
concluded: “Um’s will not be associated with poor speech, but noting ums will
be…Just about every speaker produces um’s, but the good speakers, by keeping
substance, not style, the center of attention, will effectively hide their
hesitancies.”
Brett & Kate McKay
http://artofmanliness.com/2012/06/14/becoming-well-spoken-how-to-minimize-your-uhs-and-ums/
No comments:
Post a Comment