IPods Harmful to Hearing?

It was a great presentation, very clear and authentic, anyway I like my human presentations non-robotic.

I haven’t listened to your talk, but I have noticed that I’m much more aware of the ums, pauses, and errors in my own recorded talks than in those by others, probably because I already know the content, and thus I concentrate on the form.

One a related note, I realizes some years ago that lecturing in rooms that seat 120-150 (and sometimes 250) has led me to adopt a kind of booming voice delivery that reaches everyone but cuts out a lot of the variety of which my voice is capable. I’ve considered emulating Spalding Gray’s delivery, which would require a mike in big classrooms, but would give me a much broader palette with which to work.

Amateur public speakers–and I include academics in this category–almost always speak way too fast. Listen to a really good political speechmaker, and if you pay attention to the cadence, you’ll be shocked at how slow they are speaking. The ums and ahs and whatnot are effective because they force you to slow down and give the audience time to catch up. If you speak slowly enough, you don’t need them.

Thank you so much for the original talk and passing along “Don’t Ditch the Ums.”  I like ums so much better than the aggressive punctuations “look” and “listen,” and better than “right,” especially when said without the rise at the end.  I have tried to leave the space and do a silent “um.”  Perhaps an “um drum” we could hit each time we get to that moment would work. :)

I’m terribly conflicted about recording my voice for students and “memorialization.”  A colleague of mind recently died and her online recordings have become problematic for her family and friends…perhaps with time.

Scott Fraundorf and Duane Watson’s research undoubtedly explains something that may have been omitted from the press release:  pauses are the speaker’s (largely unconsious) strategy to allow extra planning time for the next chunk of material to be said.  Therefore, as several comments here note, the more you practice and also learn to slow down, the less you umm.  Since the pausing and similar strategies like adding filler words (like, um, you know, sort of) are an unconscious and natural consequence of the way unpracticed language production works, practicing the material is a better strategy for getting rid of these things than consciously trying to eliminate them.

I was broken of “ums” and “ahs” in high school by a history teacher and his “Ahh Meter.”  Students would be given a photo from that day’s newspaper and asked to speak extemporaneously for three minutes.  Said teacher would sit in the back of the room with a 3 lb coffee can and a handful of huge nuts and bolts.  Upon the first “ah” or “um” –  WHAM…the bolts and nuts hit the can with the most awful racket.  Cured every single one of us of that habit….To this day, I do not punctuate my speeches or lectures with “ums” or “ahs,” and I find it most distracting to listen to someone who does.  Thank you Larry Marzulli!!!!

B/c I watched the TED after reading this, I noticed “um.”  No real distraction.
A/b content — K-12 schools could do likewise, and some may do that already when distance or course offerings are big factors.

 lessen

Great presentation Claire. I didn’t notice the “disfluencies” either. But I’m with you on the search for more felicitous ways to fill those gaps. Most of us are uncomfortable with “dead air space” when speaking, but I’m coming to feel that simply pausing and allowing listeners in meetings, lecture halls, conversations, etc. to “see me thinking” may be just fine.

Of course, this also means they have to be patient. But maybe that’s okay, too?

I teach an oral presentation  class for science grad students.  I would disagree about the Ums, Ahs, etc.  They should be ditched whenever possible since they are very distracting to the audience and make the speaker sound very uncertain about their topic.  However, I would agree with others about cadence.   Most nervous  speakers go way too fast when over rehearsed.  The key is to just stop talking when thinking about what to say next without putting in an UM.  However, it can be weird and distracting to take that too far as well.  Once I had a student who would pause 15 seconds between slides….

While people who are distressed by their own, and others’, stuttering may disagree, I’m not altogether sure that the distinction is that clear cut, except that the two are subject to different forms of stigma. The link was intentional. It was intended to make readers think about listening, patterns of speech that are perhaps wrongly viewed as shameful and disfunctional, and the dominant assumption that disfluent speech patterns indicate disorganized thought and a lack of will.  I know several academics who stutter and the corollary to this research would be that they are extraordinarily popular teachers from whom students claim to learn in distinctive ways.  I am also using the word “quirk” deliberately, since it is exactly employed that way in Looney Tunes.  If you notice, Porky Pig usually has something extraordinarily important to say, and he makes you wait for it.  Daffy Duck, however, is elegantly verbose and says almost nothing of any substance.

Depending on the number of “um”s and how jarringly they’re said, I can sometimes find myself focusing more on them than on the presentation content. Generally, it seems that heavy reliance on “um”s means the speaker should slow down, not necessarily polish their presentation to the point of being robotic.