Again I don't know what that is, but that whole sentence there,
that's a really big build up signaling something important is about to be said.
And if you did something like that, even if you had an audience member who was
maybe only kind of paying attention, they could hear that line,
maybe not notice it, maybe the slow repetition, he's like hm, what's this now?
Right? So, pauses and repetition are good tools,
but you don't want to abuse them.
You can't keep doing big pregnant pauses for everything.
The talk will sound exhaustively over dramatic.
You gotta use them appropriately.
And that means you have to decide where you're going to spend
the very limited resource of your audience's attention.
Finally, privilege the intonation unit.
So where I'm speaking more slowly with pauses on important lines is deliberate,
this is more sort of a background concern.
So the intonation unit is important.
As we've discussed, it's how we want to hear and process chunks of talk.
So if you break up the intonation unit, you're going to sound less fluent,
and the audience is going to have a slightly harder time processing the idea.
Not a hugely harder time, I'm talking milliseconds here.
It's not like you're going to be in your talk and say in the middle of
an intonation unit and they're going to be like no, I'm so confused.
I was following the talk but now night is day, up is down.
Right, it's not going to drive them over the edge okay, that not going to happen.
But what we do want to do is we want to be aware as much as possible,
of where we're putting our pauses.
We want to avoid breaking up that intonation unit.
So if I'm speaking, for example, if I'm speaking and I put the pause in the middle
of a phrase, but then actually, I don't pause at the next intonation boundary and
I keep going until I finally run out.
Well, that's significantly harder to understand, okay?
So we don't want that.
That's monkeying around with the intonation units.
If you can envision them as a curve, or as a shape as much as possible,
I want to put the intonation unit boundaries where I'm putting in my pauses.
Now I know that's easier said than done.
That's undoubtable and it's especially difficult if you're a non-native speaker,
if you're delivering a speech in your non-native language.
So in those cases, I generally advise people to speak maybe a little bit slower,
just give themselves just that extra millisecond of processing time to figure
out what they're going to say so they can avoid breaking off a thought midstream.
And I think it's even better if you have to have lots of pauses in there,
I think it's better to have longer pauses between intonation units.
So basically you sit longer in the pause rather than start at an intonation unit,
start a sentence before you're ready and
have to take a pause in the middle of it to gather your thoughts.