What's the best way to break bad speech habits?

[anorlunda]

I just finished watching a fine debate.
It included Law Professors Eugene Volokh, Lawrence Tribe, plus Katie Fallow, Gautam Hans, and Colin Stretch. All of them learned, articulate, informed, and tempered. But their discussion was marred by an excessive number of ahs, ums, you-knows, and, but, so, like, basically, double clutches and other amateurish bad speech habits.

A filler word fills a pause in the speech without changing the meaning of the sentence.

I'm sensitive to that because I've been a Toastmaster for several years, and I helped teach hundreds of people to break those bad habits. The habits are bad because they distract the audience from your message. If excessive and if online, bad speech habits encourage listeners to click away to watch something else. High quality outlets like NPR and programs like Jeopardy, edit out the filler words before broadcast which makes the speakers sound more intelligent, wise, and worth listening to.

The way we teach speakers to break those habits is simply to make them aware of how often they do it. When I practice a speech at home, my wife rings a bell whenever I use a filler word. At Toastmasters meetings we have "ah counters" who actually count everyone's fillers and report them to everyone, naming the offenders and the number of offenses. Almost everyone finds that self-awareness makes those bad habits go away quickly. (Hard core Toastmaster clubs sound a klaxon when a filler word is heard. That is embarrassing and disruptive. That method rude, and excessive, but highly effective. Speakers learn rapidly how to avoid hearing that sound.)

I was struck because I watched this discussion on YouTube with the auto-generated closed captioning turned on. Captioning is far from perfect, but it did capture almost all the ahs and ums.

Here's my idea. Platforms like Zoom, and FaceTime, and Microsoft Teams can all do auto-generated closed captions. Some of them do it already, offering written transcripts of what was said. They could offer a new feature, an automated ah-um tutor. The tutor feature would make the screen briefly flash red when a filler word is detected. Nobody is perfect, so everyone will get a flash once in a while, but an excessive number of flashes annoys the speaker enough to make him/her self aware and they change their speech habits spontaneously. To be clear, only the speaker should see the red flashes, not the audience.

I'm retired, so I'm not interested in making a startup company to implement that idea, nor to try to persuade Zoom, Apple, Microsoft or others to include that feature. Maybe some other PF member would like to pick it up.

---
Off topic. A post about tutoring gives me an excuse to repeat my all time favorite limerick.

A tutor who tooted his flute,
once taught two young tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
"Is it better to toot,
or to tutor two tooters to toot."

 

[PeterDonis]

A post about tutoring gives me an excuse to repeat my all time favorite limerick.

To fully exploit the sound pattern and rhyme in the writing, the "or" at the start of the last line should go at the end of the fourth line.