You will be able to reduce filler words by replacing them with pauses.
Wei Ling is preparing a talk for a management meeting. Her colleague watches her rehearse and afterwards says only that Wei Ling says "so" a lot, and Wei Ling doesn't believe her.
Nearly everyone uses filler words. They say less about your skill as a speaker than about the fact that you're thinking in real time, and speaking is thinking in real time. The aim is to reduce your fillers until they stop distracting the audience, without making you sound as if you're reading a script.
Filler words are sounds and short words such as um, ah, er, so, right, okay, actually, basically and you know. The long, stretched "erm" you often hear in meeting rooms while someone searches for the next idea is a filler too.
Fillers nearly always do the same job. They fill silence while you think. Your brain is choosing the next words while your mouth holds the floor so nobody interrupts. In conversation that is useful. In a presentation nobody is going to interrupt you, so the filler is a habit with no purpose.
Fillers cluster at three moments: the start of a sentence, the move from one point to the next, and right after a slide changes. They cluster there because those are the moments when you're deciding what comes next.
You can't reduce what you can't hear, and most people don't hear their own fillers while they're speaking. So the first step is to count them. When Wei Ling played back a recording of her rehearsal, she counted twenty-three fillers in ten minutes. Nearly all of them were "so". Most came at the start of sentences, and a few were doubled, as in "So, so the pilot showed..."
To count your own:
Record two minutes of your talk, delivered as you would deliver it for real. Play it back with a notepad and make a mark for each filler you hear. Note which filler words come up most. Note where they cluster: at the start of sentences, at transitions, or at slide changes.
For many people the count drops on the very next attempt with no other change. Once you've heard your fillers, you start to notice them as they come, and noticing is often enough to swap one for a pause.
The most effective fix is to stop the sound and keep the thinking. When you feel a filler coming, close your mouth and pause. The pause does the same job, because it gives you time to think, but the audience hears it as deliberate and calm. A short pause where an "um" would have been usually sounds more confident than the filler. Listeners don't hear hesitation in the pause. They hear someone taking a moment. This technique links directly to Lesson 5.1, "Pace, pauses and volume".
Pausing feels strange at first, and while you're in a pause it seems very long. On a recording it usually sounds shorter than it felt, and better than the version with fillers.
Slowing your whole pace a little also helps. Many fillers come from rushing, when your mouth gets ahead of your brain. If you speak a little more slowly, your brain has time to catch up without a filler covering the gap.
Focus on the places where your fillers cluster rather than trying to fix every one. Wei Ling's talk has three points, and most of her fillers were at the transitions between them, so that's where she worked. At each transition she practised a pause followed by a signpost, which is a short phrase that announces the next point. She left a beat of silence and then said "The second reason is cost." Her next ten-minute recording had nine fillers. Each time you make a change like this, re-record and count again.
Don't aim for zero. A few fillers are normal, and 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 had been memorised word for word.
Fixating on fillers also has a cost. If you spend your attention monitoring every word for an "um", that attention isn't on your audience or your message. Speakers who try to remove every filler sometimes become more hesitant than before, because every sentence carries a small fear of slipping.
Aim for a count low enough that nobody would think to mention it. Then stop counting and put your attention back on the message and the room. Wei Ling stopped counting after her third recording, because nine in ten minutes is a number nobody at the management meeting would 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 using pauses, and count again.
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