THE MOST PRECIOUS THINGS IN SPEECH ARE THE PAUSES ~ RALPH RICHARDSON

Writers have a number of tools they can use to make their writings more understandable: punctuation marks, titles, capitalisation, italics, boldface, paragraphs, etc. Speakers however don’t have these tools! To make their speeches more understandable they rely mainly on two things: intonation (change of pitch of their voice) and on pauses. In this post I will be focusing on pauses and why they are important.

Pauses give people a chance to think about what you have said. People process your ideas when you are silent not when you are speaking. Even a one second pause can give people time to absorb what you have said. Without a pause people can get overwhelmed and lose track of your thoughts.

Pauses are also a great way to deliver punchlines! Think of speaking as a flow of energy between you and the audience and pauses are dams in the path of this energy. With a pause you can hold and build up this energy before releasing it in a punchline! The longer the pause, the more energy you build up and the stronger the punchline is.

Finally pauses act as the commas, fullstops and paragraph spaces of speech. A comma is a short pause, a fullstop is a longer one and a paragraph space is even a longer one. Just as an article without commas, fullstops and paragraphs is incomprehensible, so too is a speech without pauses.

Indeed… “The most precious things in speech are the pauses”.