comms

This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers.

As you can tell from a number of the top twenty-five TED Talkers (who regularly ‘um’ and ‘er’), it’s not that big an issue, but it’s good to eliminate these ‘fillers’: it helps you control the pace of your speech if you’re focused on not saying ‘um’ and ‘er’. Slowing down can help your sense and fluidity: just pause and breathe instead of saying

As the writer Sam Leith says of good prose, ‘You are not only making a case or imparting information; you are cultivating a relationship.’ The aim is to connect.

four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.

She also includes a number of ‘markers’ in her speech to direct our attention and link her thoughts. ‘Which brings me to this …’; ‘What I know for sure …’ These moments give us time to take in what she’s talking about and give her time to breathe.

The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure. Brain scans reveal that curiosity begins as a little kick in the brain’s reward system: we crave to know the answer, or what happens next in the story,

When in Doubt, Stop Talking The more uncertain you are about your next words, the more slowly you should speak, even coming to a dead stop if needed. Barack Obama frequently does this. When he arrives at a conversational intersection and realizes that his next word could have an enormous impact, he stops speaking for a beat or two until he is sure