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".
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.
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.
Heh, I'm the other way around.
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 guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.
Years later, and the habit went away by itself.
(assuming you see this as a problem. I actually think this is an overrated problem IRL.)
Nobody got higher than a D on the first presentation. Nobody got lower than a B after that.
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".
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.
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).
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 :)
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.
For example, I hit on a lot of women and in the process, over some time, end up saying basically the same lines and stories. I risk coming across as too-smooth/scripted which is just as bad as being very nervous.
Especially when retelling a story, I intentionally inject plenty of 'umms' and look up as if I am trying to recollect something from my memory.
Showing that the function is linearly increasing is the same as showing that it has a constant slope, in any case.
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[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...
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.
The resultant sound is like a cow mooing, or someone doing an offensive impersonation of a downs syndrome patient at the top of their voice. The effect is totally unbearable and I have no idea how people sit through hours of this stuff.
had 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
Yeah, shameless linkbait. Sorry. :)
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.
Not a big deal unless you're really worried about your first impression. Once you're where John Carmack or Paul Graham is, that's not an issue.
I recently noticed that Chuck Klosterman's delivery sounds a lot like an excited Paul Graham. He's a good model for what Paul would sound like with more flow between individual thoughts:
I clicked on your logo on that page, and although it is a clickable element, NOTHING HAPPENED. Please, please, please, please link your logo to your home page. Please.
When the new division head announced that we'd been acquired because Sprint loved everything about us, and he was only introducing a few minor, very cosmetic, changes? All I could focus on was his 'um's.
That and my resume.
pg talking about why Hacker News has it's quirks? Loved it.
I guess the same thing happens with spouses. My second wife does things that I -know- should annoy me. They do when other people do them. But with her .. it's cute. Adorable. Another reason why I love her so much.
Been almost fifteen years since I got hitched - I guess it's true love.
I remember listening to RMS talk at the HOPE conference one year and it was painful to watch him talk. He obviously needed very long breaks when he was speaking, using them to take sips of Pepsi. The pauses were at times in his speaking were almost planned for some sort of applause or at best internal agreement and reflection on the idea. It was all very awkward, if you can't tell.
It was RMS, so nobody cared, but I'm sure that he could have gotten his message across better with some effort.
I have to say PGs 'UHM's were very noticeable (distracting, even), although that perhaps was a little influenced by the prior mention.
Finally- slightly OT but i missed the discussion thread- I was really disappointed by Paul's responses to the questions asked. While I understand it is difficult to come up with a proper response on the spot, i thought the questions particularly about university's peripheral 'roles', and manufacturing-oriented start-ups were really insightful and his mostly side-stepping answers really missed an opportunity.
[1] http://pyvideo.org/video/628/keynote-paul-graham-ycombinator [2] http://pyvideo.org/video/626/keynote-paul-graham-ycombinator
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.
Then again maybe it's one of those habitual things, for example when someone says "Knowwhatimean" repeatedly.
