It's a very unique 'um', too. You could tell he was pretty nervous. But as someone who has had my 'um's during speeches ruthlessly pointed out to me, I'm basically trained to notice when someone says 'um.' PG's speech was tough to listen to.
It didn't seem like nerves. It appeared that he was thinking through some of these things on stage in more depth than he had previously done so the ums provided the time to collect the thoughts in a coherent manner.
that reminds me - I can't find the link now, but - someone had counted the vocalized pauses of college professors and averaged them by subject. They found that professors of math and hard sciences used the fewest, and that professors of philosophy used the most. Presumably, because, when there's less of a definitive answer to a question, you must work harder to come up with words to describe it.
Very distinctive 'Um' indeed. No kidding, I actually Googled 'paul graham um' after about two minutes. However the talk was great and the ways in which pg expressed his ideas was particularly interesting.
Ha - funny, this is the first thing I noticed when watching the video of this presentation, and it drove me so crazy I only made it through the first 3 minutes before I had to stop watching. Wish it wasn't the case, would have loved to watch the whole thing, but it was maddening....
The only people this matters to is people who count how many times the speaker says "um". Toastmasters types. The rest of us can see the forest for the trees.
It was very distracting. It takes quite a bit of training to eliminate pauses from speech but it takes significantly less effort to replace 'um' with a pause.
Pauses are widely viewed as the ideal replacement to umm/uhh.
I took public speaking in college, attended Toastmasters for a while, and also attended an in-office public speaking class when was working in a corporate setting. All of these groups offered the advice to remove umm/err/uhh from your vocabulary.
They're noises that make the speaker seem less comfortable and competent, and that don't add value.
As a startup CEO, I routinely visit clients and potential clients, and often find myself facing a room with 10 or 20 people. I find that I perform much better than my CTO, in large part because my speaking skills give me a higher level of initial perceived credibility, allowing the rest of my words to be viewed through a more positive lens.
I think that many people don't consciously note a thing, but it still has an effect upon them.
This does not apply to PG, but sometimes I find myself disliking a speaker but not quite realizing why until hours after the discussion when I can freely introspect and disentangle my emotions.
Simply understanding your own biases, and emotional peeves doesn't make you elitist which is what you seem to be implying by mentioning the "Toastmaster types".
So like it doesn't matter if your writing or speaking skills aren't so great because content matters more than having really polished structure and delivery people can see the forest for the trees.
Personally I don't understand y some peopl get all uppity if there's an occasional spelling error or grammatical problem, I mean, they know what I want to say, so that's all that matters am i right? I think those "toastmasters types" who spend a little time practicing their techniques are just the equivalent of grammarnazis and they're just idiots who can't see the forest for the trees.
If I'm sayingsmart things it doesn't matter how I say them.
It distracts, no matter if you count or not.
And really, if you do a lot of public speaking and respect your audience—do a favor to your audience and try to improve.
Sure, audience will bear with almost anything and more so if what you say is interesting—but why make them suffer?
I've really enjoyed the presentation but I've noticed the 'um' too. hopefully pg will see this thread as constructive criticism and he'll make an effort to get rid of the 'um'.
I was there for his pycon talk, and it seemed to me (they stood out for me as well) that he was using disfluencies to express disbelief or punctuate something extraordinary or unexpected with humor. I do this too? But instead of uhm, I'll end a statement on a rising tone as in an interrogative?
You’re in good company. The rising tone at the end of a sentence used in a non-interrogative context is called uptalk or a high rising terminal [1]. Its increased use has been a far-reaching dialect shift that has been ongoing for a couple of decades now. The New York Times published an article on it in 1993 [2] and just recently another [3] with a good overview of how its use has mostly spread into every corner of the American populace. Perhaps my favorite discussion of uptalk is an analysis of some of George W. Bush’s speeches in which he extensively employs it [4].
Maybe this one speech was an outlier; I haven't noticed this in previous pg speeches (in front of 300+ people, and some televised things like the NY event).
Peter Thiel, on the other hand, has consistently technically-bad speech patterns, but the content is compelling enough to make up for it.
Tracking the same speaker in multiple venues/contexts vs. comparing different speakers seems a lot more interesting.
I'm a hacker by nature and have been bettering myself through Toastmasters for years. I didn't find the comment dismissive. Public speaking is a skill that takes a lot of effort to develop and maintain. I agree it's impressive when someone who spends lots of time hacking (and communicating 1:1) can also deliver an effective speech in front of a crowd, even if that speech has flaws.
I have an uncle who is a scientist. He speaks very slowly. And he leaves long pauses between his sentences. The reason for that is that he actually thinks through what he says. There is relatively little 'signal', but the value of what he says is large enough to make up for the low bitrate.
In your example, the "signal" would be what he says and I'm assuming you mean the silence to be the "noise". Large enough gaps between information could lead to a distortion of the message, regardless of how profound the information may be.
I think that was Jemka's point. Sidnal/noise ratio is not the same thing as throughput.
For instance imagine that instead of stopping to think, your uncle turned on the radio during the pauses. The same amount of useful information would be transmitted but we would not say that both scenarios are equally desirable.
Silence is the desirable pause method. It allows the audience to absorb and understand the signal better.
I think and speak very fast - but when I speak in front of others, my physical speaking ability doesnt keep up with my thinking and I end up saying UM a lot.
I watched others speak and never say UM and I just don't know how they do it.
Just like anything else, public speaking is a skill. To do it well requires focused practice. Learn to keep your mind and your mouth at the same pace and be willing to have silence while you think, rather than um, or have something more substantial to come out of your mouth than um.
It isn't easy of course, but any skill worth learning isn't.
When trying to improve public speaking skills this is a common thing to work on. It's certainly not easy at the start, but it is something that can improve a lot with practice, even for particularly nervous or fast-speaking individuals.
This is a common habit for PG. I've seen him speak in person 2-3 times and watched a handful of videos of him, and each time I noticed the amount that he said "um". Obviously the content is valuable and worth listening to, but it is naive to say that these sort of distractions by any speaker are worth overlooking.
Unfortunately, these are distractions from the content, which is what matters. Simple exercises could could help fix the habit with only a few hours of practice.
A trick that helped me in college was to say "uh" or "um" every other word while practicing a speech. This mental trick causes you to be hyper-aware of the habit, thus helping you to subconsciously stop inserting the words into speech. Try it out sometime.
One of the things even the high-powered public speaking trainers tell you is that the only way not to be nervous is if you no longer care. Any time you have an audience you actually want to learn something or be convinced to take some action, you should feel a bit nervous.
To my surprise, Ed Witten, one of the preeminent physicists of our time, is quite gifted in public talks and interviews from what I've seen of him. You'd expect someone explaining string theory to laymen to throw in a few "ums," but they're quite rare in this and other interviews (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1BcyxQCnoE&feature=rela...). I find it inspiring, as someone who's had issues with public speaking in the past, to see such a brilliant man handle a conversation with such ease.
As someone who's not a great speaker, it's always disconcerted me a bit about the disproportionate weight we (myself included) place on the manner in which a message is presented.
PG's a great thinker about the subjects he discusses, and his essays have a very high signal to noise ratio. But when this video was first posted the 'umms' was one of the top comment, and probably detracted quite a bit from the core message he was conveying. Had this been an essay, I suspect the reception would have been more positive.
Conversely, if you re-read the TSA blog response which we all ridiculed, it was actually an EXCELLENT response for a TV news journal format (think O'Reilly or Anderson Cooper). He dodged the issue, obfuscated a bit, threw in a few quips, and ended the blog post addressing a completely different issue. If the TSA rep had gave that response on TV, many people would have perceived the TSA to have 'won' the argument. But because it was in written format, we were all free to dissect for the actual content, and we came away underwhelmed.
REALLY good speakers have an almost magical ability to enchant audiences even if they're not saying anything of importance. Probably the best public speaker I've ever seen was a preacher who when I parsed for content wasn't saying much. A close second was a Yale undergrad years ago doing a debate competition about some trivial topic I can't even recall. I do remember the impression he left though, and thinking this guy was good enough to temporarily convince me that the sun revolved around the earth.
> PG's a great thinker about the subjects he discusses, and his essays have a very high signal to noise ratio. But when this video was first posted the 'umms' was one of the top comment, and probably detracted quite a bit from the core message he was conveying. Had this been an essay, I suspect the reception would have been more positive.
You don't even have to guess-pg published the contents of this talk in the essay "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas", which was much better received than the video, judging by the HN threads.
Exactly. Having seen pg speak many times, I can say that his 'umms' actually give you the feeling that he is thinking hard about the topic versus just rattling out some predetermined idea.
As I stated in my earlier comment, I think 'umms' can actually help the speaker establish genuineness with the audience.
Good way to get attention to your service, and I did check it out, but, uh, pricing? Would have considered service but unknown cost made me head back to HN.
Apologies for the way, way off topic post, but we'll be announcing pricing soon. Hopefully in a couple of days, and we'll be sure to 'tell HN' when we do. It's likely to be between $30/month and $200/month depending on volume.
I would love a "Tech Jam" -- like a poetry jam, where you get in front of an audiance and can speak on any subject (tech related) for 5 minutes or so to get over the fear of speaking and to get over the propensity to say uhm all the time.
In such a jam, it would be great to let everyone follow some simple structure:
* My name
* My company
* My passion
* My skills as it related to that passion
Or something along these lines. Whatever the structure is - just let it be practice and not tied to anything other than stage time.
Practice. Practice. Practice. I've become a pretty good public speaker because of simply that. I absolutely adore this concept. No slides. Just a jam about something you love.
If you live in a tech-heavy area, you could probably setup (or join) a Toastmaster's chapter that was comfortable and interested in technical speech.
The typical meeting is:
- brief welcome / introductions
- Table Topics - a 20-30 minute activity, where one individual asks questions of various group members who must respond with a brief 1-2 minute speech
- Three planned speeches by three speakers
- Three spoken evaluations of the three planned speeches
- Some closing formalities.
It's a good, supportive way to get some experience.
Am I the only person who found the graph in the article a little weird? Wouldn't it have been more illustrative of the author's point (that the frequency of ums/uhs per minute was pretty consistent) to show a graph of ums/uhs per minute instead of total ums/uhs at any given time? (i.e. the graph should have been almost flat).
If anyone has a similar habit and wants to stop it I will tell how my high school fixed it for almost all of us.
In my (private) high school's health class "like" and "um" and others were referred to as "stop-words" by the teacher because people would say them instead of pausing. It's really obvious once you look for them, for instance here with pg but anywhere really. I remember hearing college tour guides that would literally say "um" after every single sentence, probably unbeknownst to themselves!
Almost every class in the school had projects, and the health class project was for us to remove the stop words from our speech by the end of the semester. We did this by all using recording software (had to submit either by cassette tape or wav/mp3) and answering questions such as "Do you want to live forever and why or why not?" by speaking for at least 5 minutes. These were our homework assignments maybe once a month, with the overarching goal considered as the class project.
We had to very consciously never use any stop words. We could pause the recorder if we had trouble thinking of what to say, but we could never say those words.
I was skeptical of the assignment at first but my class all agreed by the end of the semester that it made us much better speakers, simply learning to consider our pauses instead of filling the silence with "like" and "um".
As a follow-up to this, my HS English teacher broke me of this by forcing the mantra, "if you are about to say 'um', STOP TALKING'". These works are generally used to fill the speech gap while you are thinking. It seems weird at first to pause, but eventually it becomes natural.
My HS English teacher was even more harsh (but effective) - every time someone said um, ah, like, or any other tic/pause word, she'd immediately cut them off. 'STOP.' 'TRY AGAIN.' 'NO.' etc. She was relentless, forced students to stop, calm down, gather their thoughts, and say it directly. Most students were cured in a few days, and the really bad ones a few weeks at most.
This is generally not a bad thing, though. From my slight applied linguist background: These fillers are generally used in order to establish that the speaker's turn is not yet done. In a conversational situation, having pauses instead of fillers gives the listeners openings into the conversation to become the speaker.
In presentational speeches, fillers aren't so bad, but long pauses IMO are worse. It's a natural thing to have fillers. If you want to have less, just practice more and be more comfortable with what you're talking about.
I would posit that people that say "um" more, came from upbringings where they were more likely to be interrupted the moment they left a gap in conversation. That'd be an interesting study.
There's an even more low-tech way. Teacher starts calling you out on it. A little "ding" from a bell or similar draws your attention to it, when you wouldn't notice otherwise. After a while, your classmates will start policing each other, and even the quiet ones will speak up so they can play the "game" of avoiding filler words.
I had a PM at Google who did debate in high school. In his debate class, everybody would throw a pen at him every time he said "um". He has very precise, articulate diction.
I know girls that talk faster than they can think so every third word is "like". In this case it's not a pause but more of a tick. Sometimes I am in awe of the content density. They can talk for hours and say absolutely nothing.
"Like" is increasingly used to introduce a quotation, particularly in SoCal dialect. It's not necessarily the most elegant use of language, but it's not a pause or a tick.
kristianc was like, "It's not necessarily the most elegant use of language, but it's not a pause or a tick.", but that's not, like, the only use of "like" in American vernacular. It's also used to pause, or to, like, distance yourself from what you're saying.
Nice going... For sentences like your last example, in the past few years I've been hearing "as in" with increasing frequency. I find it quite annoying and would be very curious to learn about its origins, as in how did it start.
As someone who grew up in the suburbs of Southern California, It's been my experience that 'like' it's used to introduce a paraphrase that includes non-verbal communication and/or tones that introduce not-so-subtle comments regarding the paraphrase without directly commenting nor limiting yourself with a direct quotation.
For example, I could say "kristianc was like, OMG it is NOT a pause or a tic, it is SoCal dialect!" in a sarcastic tone and roll my eyes.
edit: This form of communication doesn't translate well into digital form - email, texting, etc. - unless both people are familiar with each other's body language and the dialect to visualize (at a conscious or subconscious level) the meaning.
All communication is to some extent subject to those limitations. Wittgenstein was so like "language acquires meaning through context, bro" but only in his like, later period.
Believe it or not, you can talk for hours and say absolutely nothing without any disfluencies at all. I don't want to derail this thread into a political argument so I won't mention any specific examples, but I'm sure you can think of some yourself.
I am from the south so I think I probably pick up on the socal "like" more than people out west who hear it daily, and I distinctly remember listening to Marissa Mayer and attempting to count the instances in which she said it when I heard her speak about 7 or 8 years ago. The talk was very interesting and she didn't use it as a "thinking pause" however it was used very frequently.
My high school AP English teacher deducted a full 1% from presentation assignments for every "um" and "like" (except where the use of "like" was contextually appropriate).
Nobody got higher than a D on the first presentation. Nobody got lower than a B after that.
Half-OT: Note that words such as "like" and "um" are typically not referred to as stop words in (computational) linguistics. They are called filled pauses, or sometimes floor holders, depending on their function. Liz Shriberg's thesis was - as far as I know - the first extensive treatment of speech disfluencies in the field of computational linguistics.
The term "stop words" is, however, used in information retrieval. Here, it refers to words that appear very frequently in (almost) all documents in a corpus; so frequently in fact that they are taken not to carry any/much information content at all. Examples would be "the", "it", "and" etc. For many tasks in IR, stop words are removed from the document representation because they mostly introduce noise.
Pauses are the opposite of "a problem". They're one of THE MOST effective tools you have as a speaker. Listen to any great speech. Look out for the pauses. Imagine if the impact would've been the same without them.
I'm not a speech therapist or linguist etc. so wasn't aware of any formal distinction. I can tell you that "random" pauses, as you call them, are as useful as considered pauses. They slow down what's being said, which makes the speaker appear calmer, more considered, and so on.
What you say goes against common sense and experience. Pausing randomly in the middle of a train of thought is not on the same level as a carefully considered pause. There was a real-life case study of the difference on the Language Log where the subject was a presidential debate between Bush and Kerry. Kerry spoke at a moderate rate and made careful use of pauses--he had longer pauses before beginning his answers to the moderator's question, and he had shorter, calculated pauses for rhetorical effect. By contrast, Bush launched directly into his answer before hardly taking a breath, spoke hastily, tripping over his own words, pausing frequently and inappropriately during sentences in ways that did not suggest composure but rather confusion and incompetence. Obviously that impression was not helped by his other deficiencies as an speaker, but it was a major flaw in its own right.
Bush launched directly into his answer before hardly taking a breath, spoke hastily, tripping over his own words, pausing frequently and inappropriately during sentences in ways that did not suggest composure but rather confusion and incompetence
I pretty much had this speech impediment and had to see a speech language pathologist to get it fixed :) Your description contrasting the two types of pauses nails it.
What I wrote about pauses is about pauses as opposed to ums and ahs. The unstated assumption is that the rest of the package (message structure, body language and so on, as per PG's speech) is in sync.
While Bush is indeed a really good example of how not to do it, his failing was not pausing. His failing was, as you say, confusion and incompetence.
Lol :-) I didn't say umms are bad. I said cutting them out can be good. If you're looking to improve then that's one something (one of many) you might seek to address.
Another might be how you make a statement. The one you made here is positional. It's positional in that I feel you're trying to push me into telling you you're right.
I may well be wrong, but that's what I feel when I read your comment above.
So another something one might improve, in addition to eliminating umms, is to move from a positional stance to a principled stance. [START Starship Trooper voice] Would you like to know more?[END Starship Trooper voice] :-)
I realise that the OP is about a speech, but I think universally dismissing "um"s isn't justified. A speech is not the same thing as a dialogue. Conversational fillers are useful to hold the floor (not that there aren't better ways than "um" but that doesn't mean "um" isn't useful or ineffectual).
I guess that depends on your objective. In either case (communicating a message, or arbitrary conversation) you can choose to be ok, or you can choose to be exceptional.
Ums in either case are a distraction, and to some annoying. The degree obviously varies from person to person. Being a good conversationalist is as counter-intuitive as skiing (where you have to lean forward when facing downhill) in that a good conversationalist is in fact a good listener, and only interjects to elicit more conversation from the other party. So... in a way you're right. Uming a lot when you're really just listening isn't going to affect anything ;-)
Making a speech is about communicting a message. There are many ways to structure that message, for example SCIPAB, but the structure and supporting slides, if any, can be spectacularly annihilated by a mediocre delivery.
To be exceptional you need to work on your delivery. That means slowing way down, not using ums and ahs, maintaining eye contact (I've addressed a 5000-strong crowd, so believe me when I say it's irrespective of the size of the audience), and getting your body language right.
Depends entirely on how good you want to be :-)
If you want to be exceptional you could do worse that start with The Voice Book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0571195253/ - Amazon.com is sold out). It's been derided somewhat elsewhere in this thread, but Toastmasters is another hugely useful route.
There are plenty of smooth talkers who can give a good speech, without any umms, and yet leave the audience unfulfilled. Obviously there are just as many bad speeches full of too many umms.
I think there is a middle ground where 'umms' and general fillers make the communication more authentic and seemingly less rehearsed. Most people don't like listening to a robot, not even a well-rehearsed one.
I tried a similar thing in high school to stop saying 'like' as a filler word. For me, it completely backfired though - I found myself saying 'like' twice whenever I would have said it once!
I guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.
I did this and it worked well. Except.. I then started listening back and noticed I was adding filler like "you know what I mean?" instead, which is proving a more insidious problem to stamp out.
Go to a restaurant like Subway where you go along a counter and tell the employee what you want on your food item. The challenge is to get through the whole thing without a single "um", "uh", or similar word. It's VERY easy to say "uhhh.... ummm.... pepper jack cheese!" when asked to make a choice on the spot like that.
I don't think it's nerves as much as it's a mismatch between someone's internal intelligence/thinking speed and their ability to translate that into speech on the spot.
Yes, absolutely. Different people think in different ways--some in language, some in images, and some even more abstractly. (I suspect this is the key to mathematical talent--whether or not you can think purely in mathematical abstractions without the need of other aid.) So unless you're thinking in language already, there's often a translation process you have to run your thoughts through before saying them, and this process can be expensive, especially with the pressure of people looking at you.
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[ 13.9 ms ] story [ 454 ms ] threadhad brilliant university professors who were the same.
people need to realize that this is fixable, and is very important to fix if they want to share information more effectively
I took public speaking in college, attended Toastmasters for a while, and also attended an in-office public speaking class when was working in a corporate setting. All of these groups offered the advice to remove umm/err/uhh from your vocabulary.
They're noises that make the speaker seem less comfortable and competent, and that don't add value.
As a startup CEO, I routinely visit clients and potential clients, and often find myself facing a room with 10 or 20 people. I find that I perform much better than my CTO, in large part because my speaking skills give me a higher level of initial perceived credibility, allowing the rest of my words to be viewed through a more positive lens.
This does not apply to PG, but sometimes I find myself disliking a speaker but not quite realizing why until hours after the discussion when I can freely introspect and disentangle my emotions.
Simply understanding your own biases, and emotional peeves doesn't make you elitist which is what you seem to be implying by mentioning the "Toastmaster types".
Personally I don't understand y some peopl get all uppity if there's an occasional spelling error or grammatical problem, I mean, they know what I want to say, so that's all that matters am i right? I think those "toastmasters types" who spend a little time practicing their techniques are just the equivalent of grammarnazis and they're just idiots who can't see the forest for the trees.
If I'm sayingsmart things it doesn't matter how I say them.
###
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like-...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-...
[4] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002708.h...
Peter Thiel, on the other hand, has consistently technically-bad speech patterns, but the content is compelling enough to make up for it.
Tracking the same speaker in multiple venues/contexts vs. comparing different speakers seems a lot more interesting.
For instance imagine that instead of stopping to think, your uncle turned on the radio during the pauses. The same amount of useful information would be transmitted but we would not say that both scenarios are equally desirable.
Silence is the desirable pause method. It allows the audience to absorb and understand the signal better.
I think and speak very fast - but when I speak in front of others, my physical speaking ability doesnt keep up with my thinking and I end up saying UM a lot.
I watched others speak and never say UM and I just don't know how they do it.
It isn't easy of course, but any skill worth learning isn't.
Unfortunately, these are distractions from the content, which is what matters. Simple exercises could could help fix the habit with only a few hours of practice.
A trick that helped me in college was to say "uh" or "um" every other word while practicing a speech. This mental trick causes you to be hyper-aware of the habit, thus helping you to subconsciously stop inserting the words into speech. Try it out sometime.
He'd be so much more powerful if his speaking skills received even a small amount of focused effort.
All sorts of people can get nervous speaking in public, including people that are thought of as being 'natural' public speakers like Steve Jobs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzDBiUemCSY) and Sam Harris (http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-silent-crowd-overcomi...), as well as billionaires (http://www.quora.com/Peter-Thiel/How-is-Peter-Thiel-so-amazi...) and CEOs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hu3iG8B2g).
PG's a great thinker about the subjects he discusses, and his essays have a very high signal to noise ratio. But when this video was first posted the 'umms' was one of the top comment, and probably detracted quite a bit from the core message he was conveying. Had this been an essay, I suspect the reception would have been more positive.
Conversely, if you re-read the TSA blog response which we all ridiculed, it was actually an EXCELLENT response for a TV news journal format (think O'Reilly or Anderson Cooper). He dodged the issue, obfuscated a bit, threw in a few quips, and ended the blog post addressing a completely different issue. If the TSA rep had gave that response on TV, many people would have perceived the TSA to have 'won' the argument. But because it was in written format, we were all free to dissect for the actual content, and we came away underwhelmed.
REALLY good speakers have an almost magical ability to enchant audiences even if they're not saying anything of importance. Probably the best public speaker I've ever seen was a preacher who when I parsed for content wasn't saying much. A close second was a Yale undergrad years ago doing a debate competition about some trivial topic I can't even recall. I do remember the impression he left though, and thinking this guy was good enough to temporarily convince me that the sun revolved around the earth.
You don't even have to guess-pg published the contents of this talk in the essay "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas", which was much better received than the video, judging by the HN threads.
As I stated in my earlier comment, I think 'umms' can actually help the speaker establish genuineness with the audience.
Yeah, shameless linkbait. Sorry. :)
[1] http://pyvideo.org/video/628/keynote-paul-graham-ycombinator [2] http://pyvideo.org/video/626/keynote-paul-graham-ycombinator
In such a jam, it would be great to let everyone follow some simple structure:
* My name
* My company
* My passion
* My skills as it related to that passion
Or something along these lines. Whatever the structure is - just let it be practice and not tied to anything other than stage time.
Any HNers from SFBay interested in this? I'd love to give this a go - I'll call it UMJam :)
The typical meeting is: - brief welcome / introductions - Table Topics - a 20-30 minute activity, where one individual asks questions of various group members who must respond with a brief 1-2 minute speech - Three planned speeches by three speakers - Three spoken evaluations of the three planned speeches - Some closing formalities.
It's a good, supportive way to get some experience.
Showing that the function is linearly increasing is the same as showing that it has a constant slope, in any case.
In my (private) high school's health class "like" and "um" and others were referred to as "stop-words" by the teacher because people would say them instead of pausing. It's really obvious once you look for them, for instance here with pg but anywhere really. I remember hearing college tour guides that would literally say "um" after every single sentence, probably unbeknownst to themselves!
Almost every class in the school had projects, and the health class project was for us to remove the stop words from our speech by the end of the semester. We did this by all using recording software (had to submit either by cassette tape or wav/mp3) and answering questions such as "Do you want to live forever and why or why not?" by speaking for at least 5 minutes. These were our homework assignments maybe once a month, with the overarching goal considered as the class project.
We had to very consciously never use any stop words. We could pause the recorder if we had trouble thinking of what to say, but we could never say those words.
I was skeptical of the assignment at first but my class all agreed by the end of the semester that it made us much better speakers, simply learning to consider our pauses instead of filling the silence with "like" and "um".
In presentational speeches, fillers aren't so bad, but long pauses IMO are worse. It's a natural thing to have fillers. If you want to have less, just practice more and be more comfortable with what you're talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtirDMfcOKE
For example, I could say "kristianc was like, OMG it is NOT a pause or a tic, it is SoCal dialect!" in a sarcastic tone and roll my eyes.
edit: This form of communication doesn't translate well into digital form - email, texting, etc. - unless both people are familiar with each other's body language and the dialect to visualize (at a conscious or subconscious level) the meaning.
Heh, I'm the other way around.
Nobody got higher than a D on the first presentation. Nobody got lower than a B after that.
The term "stop words" is, however, used in information retrieval. Here, it refers to words that appear very frequently in (almost) all documents in a corpus; so frequently in fact that they are taken not to carry any/much information content at all. Examples would be "the", "it", "and" etc. For many tasks in IR, stop words are removed from the document representation because they mostly introduce noise.
(assuming you see this as a problem. I actually think this is an overrated problem IRL.)
I pretty much had this speech impediment and had to see a speech language pathologist to get it fixed :) Your description contrasting the two types of pauses nails it.
While Bush is indeed a really good example of how not to do it, his failing was not pausing. His failing was, as you say, confusion and incompetence.
See my post below.
The same could be argued about 'umms': that the 'umms' aren't the problem, confusion and incompetence is.
Another might be how you make a statement. The one you made here is positional. It's positional in that I feel you're trying to push me into telling you you're right.
I may well be wrong, but that's what I feel when I read your comment above.
So another something one might improve, in addition to eliminating umms, is to move from a positional stance to a principled stance. [START Starship Trooper voice] Would you like to know more?[END Starship Trooper voice] :-)
Ums in either case are a distraction, and to some annoying. The degree obviously varies from person to person. Being a good conversationalist is as counter-intuitive as skiing (where you have to lean forward when facing downhill) in that a good conversationalist is in fact a good listener, and only interjects to elicit more conversation from the other party. So... in a way you're right. Uming a lot when you're really just listening isn't going to affect anything ;-)
Making a speech is about communicting a message. There are many ways to structure that message, for example SCIPAB, but the structure and supporting slides, if any, can be spectacularly annihilated by a mediocre delivery.
To be exceptional you need to work on your delivery. That means slowing way down, not using ums and ahs, maintaining eye contact (I've addressed a 5000-strong crowd, so believe me when I say it's irrespective of the size of the audience), and getting your body language right.
Depends entirely on how good you want to be :-)
If you want to be exceptional you could do worse that start with The Voice Book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0571195253/ - Amazon.com is sold out). It's been derided somewhat elsewhere in this thread, but Toastmasters is another hugely useful route.
[Edit - forgot to describe SCIPAB]
(S)ituation
(C)omplication
(I)mplication
(P)osition
(A)ction
(B)enefit
I think there is a middle ground where 'umms' and general fillers make the communication more authentic and seemingly less rehearsed. Most people don't like listening to a robot, not even a well-rehearsed one.
I guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.
Years later, and the habit went away by itself.
Go to a restaurant like Subway where you go along a counter and tell the employee what you want on your food item. The challenge is to get through the whole thing without a single "um", "uh", or similar word. It's VERY easy to say "uhhh.... ummm.... pepper jack cheese!" when asked to make a choice on the spot like that.
I don't think it's nerves as much as it's a mismatch between someone's internal intelligence/thinking speed and their ability to translate that into speech on the spot.