Clarity · Beginner · 4 min
Why We Say “Um” (and How to Stop)
Fillers aren’t a vocabulary problem. They’re a timing problem, and timing can be trained.
One skill: Replacing fillers with silence
Why do smart people suddenly lose words mid-sentence? You know your subject. You could write the answer easily. But out loud, in front of someone, an um slips in (then another) and you hear yourself doing it, which somehow makes it worse.
Here’s the twist: the um isn’t a sign you don’t know what to say. It’s a sign of when you know it.
The assembly line in your head
Speaking is a pipeline. You form an idea, plan the words for it, and say them, all at once, continuously, at roughly two to three words per second. The planner is supposed to stay a phrase ahead of the mouth. When it falls behind, the mouth reaches for the next word and finds the shelf empty.
Psycholinguists Herbert Clark and Jean Fox Tree analysed thousands of these moments and found fillers aren’t random noise: speakers produce uh before minor delays and um before major ones. Your brain is, quite literally, announcing how long the planner needs.
Worth knowing
Fillers aren’t evil.
In one memory experiment, listeners actually recalled passages better when they contained natural “uh”s than when the same time was filled with coughs, a filler warns the listener that something is coming. The problem isn’t one um. It’s the rate: when every phrase carries one, listeners start hearing the leaks instead of the message.
The swap: same delay, different sound
You cannot remove the delay, planning takes the time it takes. What you can change is what the delay sounds like. An um is a delay broadcast as overload. A silent pause is the same delay broadcast as composure. Same gap, opposite impression.
✗ The leak
“So, um, I think the, like, main thing is, um, speed?”
✓ The pause
“I think the main thing is speed.”
“(breath)”
“Here’s why.”
The mechanism that makes the swap possible is sentence length. Fillers cluster where planning load peaks, at the starts of answers and in the middle of long, winding sentences. Short sentences move the planning moment to the period, where silence is free: nobody has ever sounded nervous for stopping at the end of a sentence.
- When to use it: answer openings, transitions between points, any high-stakes sentence, the places planning load peaks.
- When not to obsess: relaxed conversation. One or two fillers a minute is human; chasing zero makes you sound edited, not fluent.
- Mistake #1: speeding up. Racing to outrun fillers raises planning load, which produces more of them.
- Mistake #2: punishing yourself mid-sentence. Noticing an um and wincing costs exactly the attention your planner needed.
Your turn
The period drill
Thirty seconds, out loud, right now. Pick something easy, what you did this morning.
- Speak in deliberately short sentences. Five to eight words, then a full stop.
- Each time you feel an “um” arriving, end the sentence instead (even mid-thought) and take one silent breath.
- Start the next sentence with whatever the um was reaching for.
Practice it for real
Fillers are invisible to the person saying them, that’s why they survive. A recording isn’t polite enough to ignore them.
- The button below opens an Everyday Life prompt: record a 60-second answer.
- Open the replay: every filler is marked on the timeline, so you can see exactly where your planner falls behind.
- Re-record the same prompt once, using the period drill. Compare the two marker counts.
Key takeaways
- Fillers mark the moment word-planning falls behind speech: “uh” for small delays, “um” for big ones.
- You can’t delete the delay, only change its sound: a silent pause is the same gap, heard as composure.
- Short sentences move planning time to the period, where silence costs nothing.
- Slowing down produces fewer fillers than speeding up ever will.
- Aim for fewer per minute, not zero: an edited-sounding human is not the goal.
Cheat sheet
The Um Swap
- Hear it coming
- End the sentence early instead of bridging with um.
- Pause, don’t fill
- One silent breath buys the same planning time.
- Shorten sentences
- Five to eight words puts thinking time at the period.
- Never sprint
- Speed raises planning load; load produces fillers.
- Sane target
- A couple per minute is human. Zero sounds edited.
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References
- Clark, H. H., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, 84(1), 73-111. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00017-3
- Corley, M., & Stewart, O. W. (2008). Hesitation disfluencies in spontaneous speech: The meaning of um. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(4), 589-602. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00068.x
- Fraundorf, S. H., & Watson, D. G. (2011). The disfluent discourse: Effects of filled pauses on recall. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(2), 161-175. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.03.004