If anyone has a similar habit and wants to stop it I will tell how my high school fixed it for almost all of us.
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".
Half-OT: Note that words such as "like" and "um" are typically not referred to as stop words in (computational) linguistics. They are called filled pauses, or sometimes floor holders, depending on their function. Liz Shriberg's thesis was - as far as I know - the first extensive treatment of speech disfluencies in the field of computational linguistics.
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.
As a follow-up to this, my HS English teacher broke me of this by forcing the mantra, "if you are about to say 'um', STOP TALKING'". These works are generally used to fill the speech gap while you are thinking. It seems weird at first to pause, but eventually it becomes natural.
I know girls that talk faster than they can think so every third word is "like". In this case it's not a pause but more of a tick. Sometimes I am in awe of the content density. They can talk for hours and say absolutely nothing.
There's an even more low-tech way. Teacher starts calling you out on it. A little "ding" from a bell or similar draws your attention to it, when you wouldn't notice otherwise. After a while, your classmates will start policing each other, and even the quiet ones will speak up so they can play the "game" of avoiding filler words.
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 did this and it worked well. Except.. I then started listening back and noticed I was adding filler like "you know what I mean?" instead, which is proving a more insidious problem to stamp out.
I tried a similar thing in high school to stop saying 'like' as a filler word. For me, it completely backfired though - I found myself saying 'like' twice whenever I would have said it once!
I guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.
My high school AP English teacher deducted a full 1% from presentation assignments for every "um" and "like" (except where the use of "like" was contextually appropriate).
Nobody got higher than a D on the first presentation. Nobody got lower than a B after that.
Believe it or not I wrote the first draft of an essay about this yesterday. (I went on a one-day trip to NYC and wrote the first draft of one in each direction.) So stay tuned.
As someone who's not a great speaker, it's always disconcerted me a bit about the disproportionate weight we (myself included) place on the manner in which a message is presented.
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.
> 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.
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.
Exactly. Having seen pg speak many times, I can say that his 'umms' actually give you the feeling that he is thinking hard about the topic versus just rattling out some predetermined idea.
As I stated in my earlier comment, I think 'umms' can actually help the speaker establish genuineness with the audience.
This is a common habit for PG. I've seen him speak in person 2-3 times and watched a handful of videos of him, and each time I noticed the amount that he said "um". Obviously the content is valuable and worth listening to, but it is naive to say that these sort of distractions by any speaker are worth overlooking.
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.
One of the things even the high-powered public speaking trainers tell you is that the only way not to be nervous is if you no longer care. Any time you have an audience you actually want to learn something or be convinced to take some action, you should feel a bit nervous.
To my surprise, Ed Witten, one of the preeminent physicists of our time, is quite gifted in public talks and interviews from what I've seen of him. You'd expect someone explaining string theory to laymen to throw in a few "ums," but they're quite rare in this and other interviews (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1BcyxQCnoE&feature=rela...). I find it inspiring, as someone who's had issues with public speaking in the past, to see such a brilliant man handle a conversation with such ease.
Am I the only person who found the graph in the article a little weird? Wouldn't it have been more illustrative of the author's point (that the frequency of ums/uhs per minute was pretty consistent) to show a graph of ums/uhs per minute instead of total ums/uhs at any given time? (i.e. the graph should have been almost flat).
It's a very unique 'um', too. You could tell he was pretty nervous. But as someone who has had my 'um's during speeches ruthlessly pointed out to me, I'm basically trained to notice when someone says 'um.' PG's speech was tough to listen to.
It didn't seem like nerves. It appeared that he was thinking through some of these things on stage in more depth than he had previously done so the ums provided the time to collect the thoughts in a coherent manner.
Very distinctive 'Um' indeed. No kidding, I actually Googled 'paul graham um' after about two minutes. However the talk was great and the ways in which pg expressed his ideas was particularly interesting.
I would love a "Tech Jam" -- like a poetry jam, where you get in front of an audiance and can speak on any subject (tech related) for 5 minutes or so to get over the fear of speaking and to get over the propensity to say uhm all the time.
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.
Practice. Practice. Practice. I've become a pretty good public speaker because of simply that. I absolutely adore this concept. No slides. Just a jam about something you love.
I was there for his pycon talk, and it seemed to me (they stood out for me as well) that he was using disfluencies to express disbelief or punctuate something extraordinary or unexpected with humor. I do this too? But instead of uhm, I'll end a statement on a rising tone as in an interrogative?
You’re in good company. The rising tone at the end of a sentence used in a non-interrogative context is called uptalk or a high rising terminal [1]. Its increased use has been a far-reaching dialect shift that has been ongoing for a couple of decades now. The New York Times published an article on it in 1993 [2] and just recently another [3] with a good overview of how its use has mostly spread into every corner of the American populace. Perhaps my favorite discussion of uptalk is an analysis of some of George W. Bush’s speeches in which he extensively employs it [4].
This is just a minor end-of-thought speaking affectation. I've never really been bothered by it. John Carmack has an even more characteristic "um" which comes out like the word "I'm". That honestly did bother me at first, but you get over it after a while.
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 quit on my own, instantly, within 3 minutes of practice by simply TALKING SLOWER. It's like I gave my brain enough time to send words to my mouth and I stopped saying "um" and pausing immediately. It felt miraculous. lol.
Neat post. Good way to highlight how easy it is to use your app (I'm assuming it's easy).
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.
I have noticed that my annoyance at a speaker's 'um' goes way up when I don't like the speaker, or the subject matter is turning me off.
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 first read many PG's essays, and only recently has seen him on video. But, by that time, my attitude was set in such way, that I take his ummms as a sign that he is taking a wee bit of time to translate what is going in his head into more human understandable form. His essays show clearly the depth of thinking. Such thoughts need extra effort/time to translate from human lisp to human language. So, I have no problem that PG takes a second now and then to formulate a thought to be understandable by a wider audience.
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.
Yes, absolutely. Different people think in different ways--some in language, some in images, and some even more abstractly. (I suspect this is the key to mathematical talent--whether or not you can think purely in mathematical abstractions without the need of other aid.) So unless you're thinking in language already, there's often a translation process you have to run your thoughts through before saying them, and this process can be expensive, especially with the pressure of people looking at you.
While I have no particular training, this does not match my experience or intuition.
I think the best thing to do, when the situation permits, is to clearly think through what you want to say before you start speaking. Then you do not need filler. If you find yourself reaching for filler, then I think it is better to stop entirely until you clearly think of the next cogent thing to say.
(Note thought that filler is different from a transition phrase. A transition phrase, which might include "on the other hand" and similar phrases, don't add meaning per se but do clearly indicate you are shifting arguments slightly which can help others follow your reasoning. But that is meant to transition, not form filler, and even then transition phrases are often overused.)
This is something that can be curbed with practice. If you give your presentation to someone, they should point this out. To get better at public speaking, you should try to curb any behavior that detracts from the message that you want to deliver.
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.
Reading this thread, the masses of 'um's here really feel contagious.. i wouldn't want to be starting a speech right now.
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.
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.
Just like anything else, public speaking is a skill. To do it well requires focused practice. Learn to keep your mind and your mouth at the same pace and be willing to have silence while you think, rather than um, or have something more substantial to come out of your mouth than um.
It isn't easy of course, but any skill worth learning isn't.
When trying to improve public speaking skills this is a common thing to work on. It's certainly not easy at the start, but it is something that can improve a lot with practice, even for particularly nervous or fast-speaking individuals.
[+] [-] simonsarris|14 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] kleiba|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gallamine|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twiceaday|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msluyter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnnnni|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] petercooper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] screwt|14 years ago|reply
I guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.
Years later, and the habit went away by itself.
[+] [-] bicknergseng|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badclient|14 years ago|reply
(assuming you see this as a problem. I actually think this is an overrated problem IRL.)
[+] [-] rprasad|14 years ago|reply
Nobody got higher than a D on the first presentation. Nobody got lower than a B after that.
[+] [-] pg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewacove|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DevX101|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SatvikBeri|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] badclient|14 years ago|reply
As I stated in my earlier comment, I think 'umms' can actually help the speaker establish genuineness with the audience.
[+] [-] danielzarick|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ttype|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nostromo|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] larsberg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redschell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WiseWeasel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoot|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Davertron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greattypo|14 years ago|reply
Showing that the function is linearly increasing is the same as showing that it has a constant slope, in any case.
[+] [-] prophetjohn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melvinram|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmackh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kn0thing|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttype|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mattdeboard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codyrobbins|14 years ago|reply
###
[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...
[+] [-] zach|14 years ago|reply
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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yTwbga3lGM#t=39m10s
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bdunbar|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] solnyshok|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meltzerj|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timwiseman|14 years ago|reply
I think the best thing to do, when the situation permits, is to clearly think through what you want to say before you start speaking. Then you do not need filler. If you find yourself reaching for filler, then I think it is better to stop entirely until you clearly think of the next cogent thing to say.
(Note thought that filler is different from a transition phrase. A transition phrase, which might include "on the other hand" and similar phrases, don't add meaning per se but do clearly indicate you are shifting arguments slightly which can help others follow your reasoning. But that is meant to transition, not form filler, and even then transition phrases are often overused.)
[+] [-] un1xl0ser|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] polshaw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samstave|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] runevault|14 years ago|reply
It isn't easy of course, but any skill worth learning isn't.
[+] [-] cgoddard|14 years ago|reply