Watching a software presentation training video some days ago I was astonished by the number of bad "euh", "ums", "eh" I and my colleagues provided during theses demo video scenes. For sure we are not like professional speakers who never do that !But in another sense, even though we would rather eliminate our "eum" and "eh", our hesitations and repetitions that could distract the audience from our main message, we have also to keep in mind that we are not obliged to be perfect but natural. Moreover a recent study from Stirling and Edimburg Universities suggest that the "ums" and "ers" don't disturb the audience but on the contrary help the brain to follow better the explanations !
Let me quote this article from the Telegraph.co.uk :
"Experts (..) asked volunteers to listen to a series of sentences, including a number punctuated by "ers" and "ahs".
- Then they tested how much the listeners could remember, and found that inserting the "ers" had a significant positive effect on how well the subjects recalled what they had heard.
- Up to an hour after hearing typical sentences, volunteers got 62 per cent of words correct where there had been an "er" in the sentence.
- That compared with 55 per cent for similar utterances where there had not been any stumbles. The tests have since been replicated twice and the results are said to be "statistically significant".
According to the researchers, "disfluencies" like "um" and "er" force the brain to pay attention."
Is that not a good news ?
As a matter a fact what we have to do is focus on the value of our software presentation and deliver our demo with naturalness and integrity . There are many kinds of successful outstanding demo and not one single formula for success.
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