New York Times:
Communications experts describe “um,” “aah,” “you know” and similar expressions as discourse markers, interjections or verbal pauses.
They often occur when we are trying to think of the next thing we are going to say, Susan Mackey-Kallis, an associate professor at Villanova University who teaches public speaking, said in an email.
When stakes are high or we are nervous — in a job or media interview, or during a speech, presentation or conference call — we tend not to breathe as much and we talk faster, so our words get ahead of our thoughts
With the explosion of podcasting comes an equal explosion of people not trained in public speaking. The funny thing is the fix is easy but hard to do. I used to have a really bad stutter until a family friend explained why I did it and gave me a couple of simple exercises. One was, “Don’t say anything until you know what you’re going to say” and the other was, “just stop talking and think about what to say next”. Now, 99% of the time, I no longer stutter.
Sadly, it’s not just podcasts that are full of this sort of thing.
Not at all. But, because of the popularity and “amateur” nature of many podcasts, it’s become a lot more obvious.
I notice this in podcasts a lot, too, especially when it seems like there’s more pressure (high-profile guest, improvisation, etc).
Most people do it in real life but we generally don’t notice it. And, because the vast majority of podcasters have no professional training in voice work, they talk like “normal people”.
Years ago I was attending a speech at MIT with my wife, and the majority of the other attendees were Japanese, as such all conversation was in Japanese. Even though I barely spoke or understood the language I wanted to attend to further develop my learning of the language.
One word kept constantly being said, “ano”. I leaned over to my wife and asked what it meant, she paused and said, it’s like saying “um”.
I shook my head and felt I had just learned a useless word. But what stuck with me was how frequently and varied the usage was. So many of the speakers had used the word “ano” that it now makes me wonder if this is yet again more of a cultural thing than necessarily a bad thing to do.
I thought Howard Stern talked like “normal people”?
Filler words are bad. Say what you mean, mean what you say … um, I think. Get to the point.
This is a real life skill I would benefitted learning in high-school, but sadly did not learn until much later in life.
i find you watch Jobs’ keynotes he was great about following one of these tips — not saying anything, using silence instead of the filler as he completed his thought and prepared to speak it. it had a dramatic affect.
Japanese is never so simple though (of course).
https://www.italki.com/question/300688?hl=en-us
and here
http://forum.jisho.org/discussion/585/ano-ne-ano-sa-ano-ma-eto-ne-jaa-etc/p1