Pauses
Pauses can enhance delivery or be filled needlessly and distract the audience.
A pause may refer to a rest, hesitation, or temporary stop. It is an interval of silence and may vary in length. The speaker may use pauses to enhance the message delivery or fill the pauses needlessly and distract the audience from the message.
Efficient and Effective Pauses
You may use a pause to emphasize that the information coming next is important, or to give the audience time to process what you have just said . Consider some of the ways that you might use pauses effectively in your delivery.
Time 100: Jimmy Wales dramatically pauses.
Jimmy Wales pauses for dramatic effect in response to Amanda Cogdon at the 2006 Time 100 gala.
- Pause enables the speaker to gather thoughts before delivering the final appeal: pause just before the utterance, think about what you want to say, and then deliver your final appeal with renewed strength.
- Pause prepares the listener to receive your message: pause and give the attention powers of your audience a rest. The thought that follows a pause is much more dynamic than if no pause had occurred.
- Pause creates effective suspense: suspense can create interest. The audience will want to find out the conclusion or what happened if you pause before the punch line or conclusion.
- Pause after an important idea: pausing gives the audience time to process what you have just said before you continue with your delivery.
- Pause at the end of a unit: you may pause to signal the close of a unit of thought, such as a sentence or main point.
Ineffective Pauses
Different types of pauses that could present problems for the speaker:
Speech Disfluencies
Speech disfluencies are breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables that occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech, including false starts (words and sentences that are cut off in the middle), phrases that are restarted and repeated, grunts, or fillers like uh, erm, and well.
Filled Pauses
Filled pauses are repetitions of syllables and words; reformulations; or false starts, where the speaker rephrases to fit the representation of grammatical repairs, partial repeats, or searching for words to carry the meaning.
Filler Words
Filler words are spoken in conversation by one participant to signal to others that he or she has paused to think, but is not yet finished speaking. Different languages have different characteristic filler sounds. The most common filler sounds in English are: uh /ə/, er /ɚ/, and um /əm/.
Today's youth uses other fillers. The following are among the more prevalent:
- y'know,
- so,
- actually,
- literally,
- basically,
- right,
- I'm tellin' ya,
- you know what I mean.
Placeholder Names
Placeholder names are filler words like thingamajig, which refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown.
Tips for speaker
Record a conversation and count the use of unnecessary pauses and filler words in relation to the other words in the speech. See if you can reduce the ratio over time.
Remember that as you become more confident and familiar with speaking it will be easier to reduce the frequency of many of the unnecessary filler words and pauses.