Speaking
How to stop saying um
Published September 23, 2026
You can hear it in a recording and almost nowhere else. In the moment, an um is invisible to you; on playback it lands like a scratch on a record. The reason it survives every promise to stop is that you have been treating it as a bad habit, when it is a symptom of something else.
Why you say um in the first place
Herbert Clark and Jean Fox Tree studied large corpora of spontaneous speech and argued that uh and um function as words rather than noise: they announce a coming delay, uh for a short one and um for a longer one. Their 2002 paper in Cognition frames them as signals a speaker uses to hold the floor while the next piece of the sentence is assembled.
That reframes the problem. A filler is the sound of your mouth arriving somewhere your planning has not reached yet. You cannot fix a planning gap by resolving to stop making a noise, which is why willpower alone never works on this. You close the gap, or you learn to fill it with silence instead.
Zero is the wrong target
Nobody in your audience is counting. What people register is density and position: three fillers inside one sentence, or an um welded to the front of every answer you give. A talk with a handful of fillers spread through it reads as natural. A talk scrubbed to zero by sheer tension reads as stiff, and tension costs you far more than the fillers ever did.
Aim for fillers that do not cluster, and for pauses that last longer than a blink.
1. Measure before you change anything
Record two minutes of yourself answering a real question out loud, then count every um, uh, like, and you know. Divide by the minutes. That number is your baseline, and it is the only honest starting point, because almost everyone guesses low before they have heard themselves.
Keep the recording. In three weeks it is the evidence that something changed.
2. Trade the filler for a pause
This is the whole technique, and everything else supports it. When you feel a filler coming, close your mouth instead. Not a shorter um, not a softer one. Silence.
It will feel far too long from the inside. From the outside, the same gap reads as composure, because a speaker who is willing to stop talking sounds like a speaker in control of the room. Practice it in low stakes first: read a paragraph aloud and replace every filler with a full stop, then answer an easy question the same way.
3. Land the period
Fillers breed where sentences refuse to end. The pattern sounds like and um, so then we, uh, looked at the data and like, the thing is, one clause dragging the next behind it. Every time you decline to end a sentence, you take on another planning debt and pay it with a filler.
Shorter sentences give your planning natural gaps to breathe in. Say the thing. Stop. Start the next one.
4. Script the three moments that break you
Fillers are not spread evenly. They cluster at the seams:
- The opening line. The first sentence out of your mouth is the one you have planned least, because you were busy being nervous. Know it by heart.
- Transitions. Moving between points is where planning load spikes. Prepare the handful of sentences that carry you from one idea to the next.
- The first three seconds after a question. This is where the reflexive um lives. Replace it with a structural opener you can say while you think: "There are two parts to that."
5. Slow the first ten seconds
Most people start faster than they can plan, then spend the rest of the talk in debt. Deliberately slow your opening, and the rest tends to arrive at a pace your planning can keep up with.
6. Practice with pressure, and with feedback
Fluency in an empty room is not the skill you need. You need it with adrenaline, which means practising in conditions that produce some: a camera on, a colleague listening, a Toastmasters meeting where a club member serving as Ah-Counter tallies every filler in the room.
And you need a feedback loop tighter than a weekly meeting. Short, frequent reps with an honest count after each one beat one long rehearsal a month.
How to stop saying um when presenting
Rehearse the transitions aloud rather than in your head. Silent rehearsal skips exactly the planning work that produces fillers, which is why a talk that felt perfect in your head falls apart at the lectern.
Put structure in your notes, not sentences. A full script invites you to hunt for the exact word you wrote and fill the search with um. Bullet cues let you build the sentence as you speak it.
Plan a pause after each key point. A scheduled silence is easier to hold than a spontaneous one, and it gives the audience a beat to absorb what you said. If you lose your place, stop, look at your notes, and start again in silence. The audience reads it as a pause for effect.
How to stop saying um in an interview
An interview loads you twice: comprehension and recall at once, under judgment. Fillers are the exhaust from that load, so reduce the load rather than fighting the sound.
Answer first, then support it. "We cut latency by half. Two things got us there." That gives you a headline you can produce immediately and a structure that plans the rest of the answer for you. It also rescues the answer if you ramble, because the point already landed.
Have six stories ready in a structure you trust, such as situation, task, action, result. Most behavioural questions are a remix of the same handful of experiences, and a story you have told aloud before needs far less planning.
Take the beat. A two-second silence before answering a hard question reads as consideration. The um that would have filled it reads as scrambling.
What about "like"?
"Like" is a different problem wearing the same coat. It is rarely a stall; it is usually a hedge ("it was like a hundred people") or a quotative ("he was like, no"). Where um signals a planning delay, like softens a claim you are not sure you want to commit to.
So the fix is different. Commit to the number, or admit the estimate: "about a hundred people." Quote people directly, or summarise what they meant. If the hedging is the honest part, say it in words: "roughly", "my rough guess is". You keep the meaning and lose the tic.
How long this takes
Awareness comes quickly, within a few days of listening back. Changed delivery under pressure takes weeks, and it does not move in a straight line.
Expect your counted rate to get worse before it gets better. That is not regression; it is your ear improving, catching fillers that used to slide past unheard. The number to watch is the trend across weeks, not any single session.
Common questions
Is saying um actually bad?
Not on its own. Research on spontaneous speech treats uh and um as words that announce a coming delay, and listeners use them to follow you. What reads as unpolished is density and clustering: three fillers in one sentence, or a filler glued to the front of every answer.
How many filler words per minute is normal?
There is no official threshold, and any number quoted as a universal standard is invented. Rate varies with how spontaneous the speech is, how technical the topic is, and how much pressure you are under. Your own baseline is the only number worth tracking, because the useful comparison is you last month.
Does speaking more slowly stop filler words?
It helps, but only because it buys planning time. If you slow your mouth without giving your planning any room, you get slower speech with the same fillers in it. Pair a slower open with shorter sentences so the planning gaps land at natural boundaries.
How long does it take to stop saying um?
Awareness arrives in days. Changed delivery under pressure takes weeks of short, frequent practice. Expect your counted rate to look worse early on, because you are finally hearing fillers you used to skip past.
Where to start tomorrow
Record two minutes. Count your fillers. Do it again the next day, and the day after, replacing one um a session with a pause you hold a beat longer than feels comfortable. The habit is built by the counting, not by the resolve.
If like is the bigger part of your pattern, it has a different cause and a different fix. If the fillers are only part of why people ask you to repeat yourself, start with speaking more clearly.
Reference: Clark, H. H., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, 84(1), 73–111.