How Long Are You Going To — Uhh — Keep Using those Verbal Fillers?
Fillers are for cupcakes. You just need to get your point across.
Verbal fillers are those slippery little words like ‘um,’ ‘like,’ ‘okay,’ and ‘so.’ You wouldn’t — uh — dream of typing them when you write. But they easily sneak into your speech patterns, making your description of the terrific article you read in the Times sound like a pre-teen describing a new type of glitter slime.
“It was, like, so good. I, like, couldn’t put it down.”
Verbal fillers are effortless little words or phrases that fall out of your mouth while your mind is trying to figure out what you really want to say . When you have the impulse to say something, you often start speaking before your thought is fully formed. Inserting little fillers is a way for you to buy time without giving up your chance to speak.
The downside is that even the greatest ideas can sound choppy and confusing when they are broken up with little bits of nonsensical language. Even worse, we often rely on verbal fillers with greater frequency when we are talking about issues that are controversial or uncomfortable.
There is good news though: using verbal fillers is just a habit, not an addiction or an incurable disease. And it’s an easy one to break if you are willing to put in a little time.
Last week, I had a meeting with one of my high school seniors. He has nearly completed his senior internship and has a whole slew of grand plans for after graduation.
He’s the type of kid that makes me feel hopeful about the future. I’ve been his teacher and academic advisor for the last four years, and I’ve spent a lot of time with him, working on his writing, his study habits and his school work.
But at this meeting, which was one of our last ones before he heads out into the real world, I felt like I needed to address one final thing.
“Josh,” I queried, “When are you going to stop saying LIKE so much?”
His brows furrowed with surprise as if he didn’t understand me.
I repeated the story he had just told me about his boss’s truck catching on fire, peppering it with ‘like’ as frequently as he had.
For a moment, he thought I was making fun of him. But then when he tried to explain himself, those ‘likes’ just kept jumping into his sentences as if he was playing ‘whack-a-mole’. The more he tried to stop using them, the more they seemed to slide into his speech. Soon he was red and flustered.
As a teacher who has worked hard to ditch my own verbal fillers so that my students will listen to me, I have developed some tried and true strategies that I passed on to him so that he could navigate his way out of the troubling speech pattern he had fallen into.
Now I’ll pass them on to you too.
1. Identify your own fillers
Many of us stick to the garden variety fillers mentioned above. But I’ve heard enough variations to know that almost any word or part of speech can play the starring verbal filler role.
My high school guidance counselor used to say ‘In terms of’ as a verbal filler. That’s right, she’d just leave it dangling open, at the beginning or end of a sentence. Sometimes she’d even double up, saying it twice in a row. When I was 14, I thought it was sophisticated adult language that I didn’t understand. By the time I graduated, I recognized it as a meaningless filler that made me unable to hear any of the words of wisdom she tried to pass on to me.
My husband has a friend who has the unfortunate verbal filler ‘fuck.’ He can’t get a sentence out without using it three or four times. And true to form, the more he says it, the harder it is not to say it. A properly placed F-bomb can have comedic or tragic impact. But too many F-bombs just makes people wish you would stop talking.
You need to figure out what your own fillers are. If you’re self-aware enough, just try listening to yourself to see which words keep popping into your sentences. If not, ask someone you spend a lot of time with to help you out. You might be surprised how easy it is for them to let you know what your fillers are.
2. Listen to yourself talk
Once your know what words you habitually inject into your sentences, you should start really trying to listen to yourself to notice how and when you use them. Often, the more difficult the conversation, the more frequently verbal fillers find their way into it.
It’s easy to tell your kids to clean their room without using verbal fillers because it’s a simple concept and a sentiment you have expressed many times before.
But talking politics with your new partner’s parents is a much bigger challenge. As your mind works to convert your ideas into language, you’ll need that extra millisecond to find just the right word. And while you’re thinking, you might as well through an ‘I guess’ or a ‘you know’ in so that they know you’re not done talking.
Just by listening to yourself, you’ll become more aware of how often you use fillers. Awareness itself will help you start to cut back because you’ll hear how your sentences sound when they are riddled with unnecessary syllables. Soon those silly little words will start to sound like an noisy bird squawk buried in the other beautiful language you are using to express yourself.
But you won’t really be successful until you take the next step.
3. Practice
When I was meeting with my student, I asked him to repeat the story about the truck a second time, giving me the same details and information, but without all the ‘likes.’
It felt a little forced and I think he was embarrassed, but I insisted. This time, I had him pause for a few seconds before he began.
When he told the story the second time, his delivery was spot on. Instead of trying to figure out what he was saying, I followed every detail. We even got laughing so hard about the part where the guy came out of the house in a bathrobe to spray water on the fire that another teacher came in to see what was going on.
When you’re ready to give up your verbal fillers, you’ll need to practice too. You can do it with a willing or unwilling partner.
If you have a trusted friend who will give you honest feedback, let them know that you’re trying to improve your communication skills by giving up fillers. Then tell them a story or have a conversation with them. Ask them how you did. If you didn’t do well, try again.
Or if you’re brave, choose someone that intimidates you to talk to. Don’t tell them what you’re doing, but instead engage them in a conversation about something that makes you nervous. Keep it short and do your best to make your points without letting your pesky fillers get in the way.
If you did well, secretly high five yourself and smile a smug little smile that will make the person wonder what you’re up to.
The key to making these practice sessions work is to be intentional. Choose a specific conversation, person or time to practice cleansing your language of verbal fillers.
Take a deep breath and pause before you start to speak. Give your mind a little head start so that your mouth doesn’t get out ahead of it.
At first, this will feel hard. You’ll find yourself having to choose between tossing in a filler word or leaving what feels like a gaping pause in your speech pattern.
Keep practicing though. Soon, those little pauses will feel more natural than shoving a misplaced word into your sentences.
And eventually, you’ll have a new habit, which will be to express yourself with concise, eloquent language. People will find you funnier, more interesting and easier to listen to.
Even if all you have to talk about is that one time you saw a truck catch on fire.
