alt Hacker NewsIt’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating them is weird.
Disfluencies aren’t necessarily bad even if the word starts with “dis”!
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siriaan • today at 4:19 AM
Occasional ums and ahs are fine but when every other phrase starts with a long aaaaah it can be pretty unpleasant to listen to.
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Having heard radio interviews with and without 'internal editing' to remove ums and ahs, most of the time I'd rather the edited version. It's more concise and focused, and I find it easier to comprehend. Too many ums and ahs and my mind wanders, and if it's radio, I can't go easily go back to try again. When I've listened to podcasts or audiobooks, I could never easily go back a little to try again either, and I gave up on them (even though I have some content I really want to listen to, it's too frustrating, so it's not happening). But I'm sure other people have different preferences.
I also don't care for writing that could have been made a lot more concise. It's a lot of work to make things shorter, but I think it's worthwhile.