Mind Transformation 379

379
Dickens Behavioral Biology 8.
d – 45.
Today, I learned a little bit about filer words. These words quite frequently appear in my speech and make me sound weak and foolish. All of these am, ah, oh, um, hum, like, ok, and others make me really miserable while I’m talking and even worse than that when I’m listening to my recorded talks.
I put the question “how to get rid of junk words” down on YouTube and immediately got relevant information to work with. Of course, most of the information was what I pretty well knew before, but there also were lots of useful stuff. For example, one suggestion was to shut the mouth after every sentence or period. It was said that all these filler words occur because we need to distinguish one part of speech from another; therefore, if our mouth is always open while we are talking, filler words are inevitable consequence of that. The next suggestion was to ask somebody to observe and detect all filler words during a conversation, and when they show up, make an unpleasant sound with the help of a phone or any other device. Basically the point is to make oneself conscious of all filler words and practice avoiding them till there is nothing to complain about. It was actually 2013 when I’d started recording my self-talks on video and suddenly realized that the way I talk was unbelievably terrible. Then, when I switched on English at the first time it was really hard to keep in mind the issue all the time while I was talking, though I never stopped to struggle with it. There were lots of self-talks where I focused only on this problem and tried to solve it by talking about it over and over again. However, I hardly remember that I wrote about it. Mostly it was a problem for my speaking practice—not writing. Well, it’d be better to attack the problem by all available means.

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