Why It's OK to Occasionally Say "Um" or "Uh"
A presenter named Max—OK?—had the bad habit—OK?—of interspersing every few words with an irrelevant word—OK?—until all I heard—OK?—was his repeated OKs—OK? Max was the head of a successful software development company and a technical genius, but would you have enjoyed listening to him for an hour? OK, as Max used it, is a pause filler, a pattern of speech that includes such favorites as ya’know and the ever popular um and its cousin uh.
In his book, Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What they Mean, author Michael Erard describes research that shows we each have our own pattern of um frequency and usage. Some people um within a sentence, some um between sentences, some um a little, some a lot, and some not at all.
In the view of many people, filler words add nothing. But this isn’t entirely true. Filler words are a natural part of human speech. In informal conversation, people tend not to even notice them as long as they’re not excessive.
The notion that umming damages good speaking is a recent and very American invention. It didn't emerge as a cultural standard until the early twentieth century when the phonograph and radio made such fillers more evident. Counting ums and noting perfect fluency gave teachers something to score.
Actually, fillers sometimes improve comprehension by signaling to the listener to pay attention to what you say next. Some storytelling groups view an occasional um as making a story sound spontaneous rather than carefully rehearsed.
Interestingly, studies suggest that uh and um play an active role in how we learn language. One study suggested that children over the age of two were more likely to pay attention to an unfamiliar object if the speaker said uh before stating its name, as though the uh indicates a word coming up that might be new and unfamiliar.
Still, if you use pause fillers too often in presentations, you’ll sound unprepared and unprofessional. So practice rigorously. Keep your sentences simple and short; complex sentences sometimes result in um-filled pauses as you figure out what you’re going to say next. Slow down so you can think ahead. Concentrate especially on your transitions from one topic to the next because that’s where ums are especially likely to surface.
But don’t go crazy trying to avoid pause fillers. They’re natural, they’re human, and they’re part of everyday conversation. Just keep them to a minimum.
