When listening to public speakers, we find many similar tendencies among their habits - especially among storytellers, motivational speakers and high profile politicians.
One fascinating thing is how they use the pause.
First, we look at the pause from the point of a speaker/presenter.
Second, using pauses as a tool of power play.
A pause can be dramatic, and it can mean that you want to foster collaboration or show that you are caring. Yet, depending on the context, a pause can be violent silence.
Understanding how silence is used in the proper context is a part of having emotional intelligence.
So, today I want to talk out about the pause.
Public Speaking
Key takeaway:
A/ You think faster than you speak. (Thus, pauses feel longer than they are)
and
B/ your audience has to think about what you said after you finished your sentence.
Or, in other words: Time feels shorter for you than the audience because you know what you said and race ahead in your mind - while the audience has to digest what you said.
Let's look at this in practice.
Pauses help your audience to understand you.
As a listener, you can only assume and estimate what someone else might say. You never know with absolute certainty. Thus, it helps to have a little bit of time to reflect and think after hearing someone end their sentence.
As a speaker, this means that pauses show your audience when a sentence, a paragraph or a thought ends, and gives them time to digest what you said. Because others do not see your punctuation, your bullet points, headlines, quotes or italic, you have to provide it for them. Thus, the pause emphasises the structure of your speech.
This has been analysed quite a bit. A frequently quoted paper by Brigitte Zellner mentioned this nicely. She writes that pauses help to render "human communication more intelligible." She is, of course, not the first one, as other researchers such as Grosjean and Deschamps noted in 1975 that "the more complex the communicative task, the greater the number of pauses."
Pauses help convey emotion.
When hearing a synthetic voice, you might feel that it lacks empathy and emotion. Mostly, the rhythm is too continuous, and the pauses in between sentences do not correlate with the sentence's context and emotional expression. As suggested by Janet Cahn already in the 90s, the pauses add emotion to speech.
Thus, you will pause more, longer or shorter, depending on whether you are sad or angry.
Generally, agitated people speak faster and have fewer pauses than calm ones. Thus, being aware of this means that you can put weight on your story's particular points and add emotional depth.
Pauses help Delivering Information
After 20 minutes, most audiences drastically lose the ability to digest new information. Thus, pauses allow you to slow down what you say, so your audience can keep following.
This is particularly interesting when seeing the differences between spontaneous speech and speech read from written texts. Speech from written text tends to produce almost only short, and medium pauses, thus, less than 0.5 seconds. Long pauses, around 1.5 seconds, are much more common when speaking freely, without reading.
I remember sitting in university lectures and having professors rattle down their 2-hour classes. The lack of naturally longer pauses made it seem much more monotonous, less flowing and way harder to keep up and digest. Thus, deliberate pacing and pauses when reading from a script help your audience keep up naturally.
Pauses Engage your audience.
If you speak without interruption, it is hard to follow you as an audience.
On the other hand, if you add pauses, your audience can think about what they heard and connect your message to their lives. This makes it more personal, and your content becomes more relatable and engaging.
Different pause Techniques
There are a variety of different pauses. Let's look at some of them and how they are used.
As pointed out by Andrew Dlugan on sixminutes, we often tend to connect sentences with 'and'. This leaves out the rather crucial semantical break that we would have in a written text and takes room away from your audience to breathe. He delineates:
comma pause
sentence pause
paragraph pause
emphasis pause
rhetorical question pause
thought pause
new slide pause
punchline pause
dramatic pause
power pause
swallow / take a deep breath pause
The Comma Pause
When we want to separate clauses or items in a list, we use the comma. The comma pause is the vocal equivalent to the written comma.
For example:
I prepared popcorn [pause], drinks [pause] and some sweet for our movie night.
The Sentence Pause
Whenever we have a period, question or exclamation mark, we separate two sentences. For this, we use a pause slightly longer than the comma pause, as the end of the clause is more potent than a comma.
For example:
I started to play the drum 12 years ago. I still remember when I bought my first own drumsticks.
The Paragraph Pause
To end a paragraph, we need an appropriate pause that is even longer than the sentence pause.
You would also use it when you separate two points from one another or separate an anecdote from a story. These pauses are long, and at around 1.5 seconds, the longest we commonly use
On a note: If you have difficulties doing these when reading written texts, edit your written text so that the end of every line falls on a break.
With this, a comma, sentence end or paragraph end is always at the end of the line. It makes the paper longer, yes, but you don't have to think or read ahead when you read it. Instead, every time you reach the end of the line, a break is needed.
The Emphasis Pause
To emphasise a specific keyword, you can add a slight pause right before and after the word.
The preceding pause signals the audience to pay attention to what is coming. At the same time, the following delay gives time to let the keyword sink in. Corley and Hartsuiker (PDF paper).
My mother always baked a special treat [pause] the emerald brownies [pause] to the winter solstice's start.
This works particularly well if you combine it with your vocal toolbox. Thus, you use appropriate intonation, change the pace, rhythm or raise/lower the pitch before reaching the keyword. Julian Asange explores this quite nicely in How to be heard.
Rhetorical Question Pause
When asking a rhetorical question, a pause stimulates the audience to reflect. "Imagine if… were to happen? Think about it for a moment; what would you do?"
If you don't allow a pause, the audience has no time to think for themselves. I tind that frustrating, as I want to know if my conclusion differs from the speakers' judgment.
New slide Pause
When you have slides, it is generally good to allow for a brief moment of silence when you put up a new slide. With this, the audience can briefly read what is on the slide. I am a fan of simple visuals. However, sometimes this is not possible, and you have more information on display. Allow an appropriate time for the audience before you signal that the focus should be back at yours.
Punchline Pause
If you have a punchline, you use a pause before and after. This is especially true with stand up comedians and in theatric settings.
I mediately before a punch line creates heightened anticipation, And, that something satisfying, something worth the wait, is coming.
Like we addressed before, a comedian or also a poet would allow a pause afterwards so that people could laugh or clap. If you want to try to speak over applause or enraged audiences, you will lose. (see for instance, when Obama talked during the 2016 rally
Dramatic Pause
A dramatic pause is often perceived as more theatric, as the name suggests. While it is frequent in storytelling, you can also emphasise the outcome of an unbelievable happening.
I love dramatic pauses. I always imagine a Shakespeare style play on stage, where the speaker realises who is the traitor to the Queen. The speaker raises their voice as they question the motive of the traitor. Another question, louder, almost shouting, now screaming at the top of their lungs and suddenly falling silent for a whopping 5 seconds in the midst of the sentence...
... before whispering the name of the traitor.
What a dramatic pause.
Power Pause
Not speaking when everybody expects you to - that is a powerful statement.
People in powerful positions use this a lot, as has been observed, for instance, by
Humes also proposes to open a speech with a long pause. With this, you demand attention. And it allows you to align yourself with your upcoming address, take a breath and link eyes with the audience.
Swallow and take a breath pause
A longer pause allows you to swallow and take a deep breath, which is beneficial for you as the speaker. It keeps your throat lubricated; your mouth does not dry out as fast, and thus, the vocal quality stays up for a longer time. A nice side effect is that pausing to take a deep breath helps your brain out as well. You know, oxygen.
When giving longer presentations, you might even need a sip of water from time to time. Max Atkinson proposes to time these longer pauses. For instance, when you have a new slide that needs to be studied by the audience, or when you just finished a section of your material and switched to a new topic. People can then also rustle and reset themselves if they have been sitting for a while.
"The sight of speakers pausing to have a drink or to check their notes is so familiar to audiences that they are unlikely to notice that anything is wrong." Max Atkinson
Thus, you can take a sip of water and take that moment to recover, think or take a deep breath to calm down. It is so powerful that I made a habit of having a glass of water stand by when having challenging meetings.
The next step would then be difficult conversations
Using pauses as a form of power play.
Intentionally using pauses to create a power play might seem peculiar. Most of us are also not not used to pause for prolonged times between sentences when the stakes are high. Instead, we tend to fill the silence with filler words such as "ehm", "uugh", "errrrrr". It is much better to pause.
In difficult conversations, you want to create control. A pause, as we just talked about, lets a point sink in.
The negotiators at Black Swan Group present the following scenario in one of their blog articles:
An Assertive person, an Accommodator and an Analyst talk together.
The analyst stops talking: "I need to think for a minute. I hope they get it and stay silent."
The Accommodator says to himself: "I go silent when I'm mad! She must be furious! I have to say something!"
The Assertive says to herself, "Hey! She shut up… she must want me to speak some more!"
Most of these reactions are innate to us and impulsive. Which means you can use it to your advantage.
Anytime you are tempted to use the word "but" "well" – that is when you might want to go silent. You can steer this if you place a cutting statement and then wait for the pause to take effect.
Silence does not mean you are furious. Some people signal anger by completely shutting everything out. Thus, silence can be violent, depending on the social situation. Imagine asking for something, and they ignore you. This feeling is violent like you are being hit or pushed away. Thus, some people tend to link silence to violence.
However, depending on the context, the same interpretation does not apply. This is contextual intelligence.
If you want to encourage collaboration and just communicated something that needs feedback, others can chime in when you stop talking. It shows that you are attentive and collaborative.
Use your body language to show that you are attentive, nodding and smiling, even on the phone. People hear when you smile when talking.
Going silent is a great way to signal to the other person you want to listen to them.
You can not hear how things are going when you are talking. The good part is: If you are the last one to speak, you can listen to all other voices before responding.
Finding the right pause
To sum up: Pauses vary greatly, depending on circumstances, the audience you speak to and how long you speak for. But also cultural habits and norms, your speaking style and your emotional wellbeing.
Think about a storyteller: they need to know where the story demands a dramatic pause. Stand up comedians have to plan for the audience to laugh, and in theatre, people may clap or need time to see someone new entering the stage, leaving or the scene changing.
Regarding public speaking training, this does need practice and you need feedback. The best ways of training this are currently to:
Record yourself and specifically analyse your pauses and sentence structures. This is tedious handiwork, but if you are serious, it pays off to go through your speeches several times to get that delivery right. I certainly should do it more often.
Ask for feedback. If you practice a speech or negotiation, ask someone about the pauses: The length of the pause, if it seemed natural, if it were dramatic, if it added to understand or follow your point and so on. Ask them beforehand about what they shall focus on so they know what you need to know most.
that's it
Almost wrote a book here
cheers
Andreas