New research shows that so-called ‘unfilled pauses’ during speech can make you sound more intelligent
Everyone wants to sound fluent. To speak in fully formed sentences, without gaps, as though they know what they are talking about. Anxiety over stumbling or tying yourself in knots trying to find the right words – a condition called glossophobia – puts many people off public speaking entirely. But linguists may now be able to offer a crumb of consolation to nervous speakers.
Hesitating, even for as little as 300 milliseconds, can change how your audience perceives you – and in a surprisingly positive way. A study in the journal Lingua has found that speech that contains “unfilled pauses” – noticeable silences between words that don’t have anything to do with punctuation – is judged more “articulate” and “educated” than speech without gaps. In short, we may finally have proof of what Ronan Keating told us two decades ago: you say it best when you say nothing at all.
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