Much like a comfort blanket, we all carry around a set of go-to words that fill the gaps in our speech and text. Mine are so, okay, and right? I taught for so long that I can’t help but pause to check for understanding–but all of us need to pause sometimes to make sure of our own understanding and orientation in the text.
I’ve been regularly attending 1MC sessions, because the writing teacher in me loves a good workshop model. Even though I’ve only been going for a couple of months, I’m already starting to get a reputation as a language person: most of my immediate advice happens for people who are testing an actual presentation on us or asking for help with crafting an appeal to investors or customers. If someone asks us feedback on textual content, I immediately pull out my phone to start taking notes.
In a recent presentation, a new local company was workshopping a pitch for a startup event the next day. They expressed a primary concern for the time limitation, and asked us to help them trim the fat, so to speak. I noticed, just a few lines in, the speaker had said today and so at least three times each. By the end of the fiveish-minute talk, I’d even heard the great line, “today we have over ninety users today” (emphasis mine). This is the clearest possible cue that today is a comfort word and not actually performing a useful function.
In this particular instance, “we have over ninety users” is just as clear: have is also in the now, at the moment, today. But in drafting this talk, the speaker was stuck on the importance of the number of users and their need for more–and ended up in a comfort-word loop as they were trying to create emphasis. Given that most feedback is allotted just a few seconds, I wasn’t able to do more than highlight repetitive words: which is still useful, and can help trim out some time.
But I think we can’t really change this behavior without understanding why it happens. One of the marks of a polished speaker is their relative lack of verbal or vocalized pauses (um, uhhhh, er): a lot of these suggests that they’re crafting their text on the fly and we’re actually hearing a first draft, which we know are messy. A common step in addressing this habit is to replace those fillers with comfort words that function much the same: giving us a moment to collect our thoughts, and/or a point to start when we’re framing a new idea. To get to something fully polished, we have to learn to recognize what our comfort words are–then they’re just a Ctrl-F away from fixing for that text.
Something Polished 