You will be able to reduce filler words by replacing them with pauses.
Wei Ling's colleague watched her rehearse and, afterwards, said only one thing: "You say 'so' a lot." Wei Ling did not believe her. Then she played back the recording and counted. Twenty-three times in ten minutes, most of them at the start of a sentence, a few of them twice in a row. "So, so the pilot showed..."
Nearly everyone uses filler words, and they say less about your skill than about the fact that you are thinking in real time, which is what speaking is. The aim of this lesson is to reduce them to the point where they stop distracting the audience, without turning you into someone who sounds like they are reading a script.
Filler words are sounds and short words such as um, ah, er, so, right, okay, actually, basically and you know. Listen in any meeting room and you will also hear the long "erm" that stretches on while someone looks for the next idea.
They nearly always do the same job: they fill silence while you think. Your brain is choosing the next words, and your mouth holds the floor so nobody interrupts. In conversation, this is useful. In a presentation, where nobody is going to interrupt you, it is a habit with no purpose.
Fillers tend to cluster at particular moments: the start of a sentence, the move from one point to the next, and right after a slide changes. Those are the moments when you are deciding what comes next.
The most effective fix is not to stop the thinking but to stop the sound. When you feel a filler coming, close your mouth and pause instead. The silence does the same job, giving you time to think, but to the audience it sounds deliberate and calm.
This links directly to lesson 5.1, Pace, pauses and volume. A short pause where an "um" would have been usually sounds more confident than the filler did. The audience does not hear hesitation. They hear someone taking a moment.
It feels strange at first, and the pause will seem very long to you while you are in it. On a recording it usually sounds shorter than it felt, and better than the version with fillers.
Slowing your whole pace a little helps too. Many fillers come from rushing, because the mouth gets ahead of the brain. Speak a little more slowly, and the brain has time to catch up without a filler to cover the gap.
You cannot reduce what you cannot hear, and most people do not hear their own fillers while speaking. The first step is to count.
Record two minutes of your talk, as you would deliver it. Play it back with a notepad and make a mark each time you hear a filler. Note which words come up most and where they cluster: start of sentences, transitions or slide changes.
For many people the count drops on the very next attempt, with no other change. Once you have heard your fillers, you start to notice them as they come, and noticing them is often enough to swap one for a pause.
Wei Ling's first count was twenty-three in ten minutes, nearly all "so". She did not try to fix them all. She focused on the transitions between her three points, where most of them sat, and practised a pause and a signpost instead: a beat of silence, then "The second reason is cost." In her next ten-minute recording, the count was nine.
A few fillers are normal. Listeners barely notice them in a talk that is otherwise clear. A talk with no fillers at all can sound oddly stiff, as if it were memorised word for word.
Fixating on fillers also has a cost. If you are monitoring every word for an "um", your attention is not on the audience or the message. Speakers who try to eliminate fillers completely sometimes become more hesitant, not less, because every sentence carries a small fear of slipping.
Aim for a count low enough that nobody would think to mention it, then put your attention back on the message and the room. Wei Ling stopped counting after her third recording, because nine in ten minutes was a number nobody at the management meeting would ever notice.
The activity asks you to count your fillers on a two-minute recording, practise the same section with pauses instead, and count again. Choose a section with at least one transition between points in it, because that is where most fillers tend to live.
Count the filler words in a two-minute recording, practise the same section with pauses, and count again.
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