Did somebody say "It Depends"?

In a toast masters club, there is a role named "Ah Counter". The duty of this person is to listen carefully to the speakers during a session and mark the gap filler words and sounds that appear between meaningful phrases. They call them "clutch words". It includes sounds and words like "Ah", "Um", "So", "but", etc. In addition, if the speaker habitually puts words such as "kind of", "sort of", "you know", etc everywhere they are also regarded as clutch words. After the speech, Ah Counter provides a report of the number of clutch words uttered by a speaker. This helps a speaker to identify the most frequent clutch words used by him (mostly unknowingly) and to put a conscious effort during next speech to minimize them. I know that this feedback approach helps greatly from my experience. I was surprised by the high clutch word count reported regarding my initial speeches in the toast masters program (conducted in our company) because I did not utter any of them intentionally. However, after being cautious about them I was able to reduce the number significantly. During my last prepared speech I uttered only one or two clutch words.

Toast masters community says that the clutch word count is an indicator of the preparedness of a speech. The argument is that a speaker will tend to put those words to fill in gaps in his speech while thinking about the next thing to say if he is not well prepared. This is a sound argument and I realized the truth in it after noticing that I always get a significantly higher clutch word count in my unprepared speeches (there is a separate session in toast masters for quick topics) than I get in prepared ones. Almost every speaker in the club exhibited an improvement in clutch word usage throughout the program indicating that they are preparing better for speeches and are becoming better public speakers.

I think there is another meaning to the clutch word count too. In my opinion, a speaker may use a gap filler word like "kind of" or "sort of" when he is not sure about what he is saying. This form of clutch words can appear even in written forms like articles. For example, I used the term "gap filler words" in the beginning of the article when introducing clutch words. If I was not certain about the appropriateness of that term I would have written "sort of gap filler words". Ideally what I should have done in such a doubtful situation is to put some extra effort to verify the appropriateness of the term or to find a better alternative term. Instead of doing that I hide this uncertainty inside the term "sort of" so that I am not responsible even if the term that follows is not a good fit. This is none other than cheating. I am cheating to the listener or to the reader by concealing my laziness. After getting to know about clutch words, I noticed that many of my previous speeches and writings exploited this cheat trick and everyday I see other speakers and writers doing the same thing. The general rule is that if you use terms like "kind of" and "sort of" unnecessarily you really do not know what you are saying.

We all have heard people using the term "it depends" during technical discussions. Some of them put it in the beginning of every fact they talk about particularly when answering questions. Is there any meaning to this term whatsoever? As a listener, I already know that "it depends". Specifically I know that everything in the world depends on something else. I do not need to read Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" to understand it. What the heck is the need for a speaker to utter this term? I guess the reason is the same as mentioned in the previous paragraph. They say "it depends" because they do not really know what they are talking about. After saying "it depends" one can say anything. He is shielded from any criticism or questioning on what he says because he dilutes it with the first two words and hence does not stand for it. I suggest to regard "it depends" as a clutch word in technical speeches. It is okay to be used when the dependency really counts where the speaker is responsible for explaining each dependency and its effect.

The toast masters program helped me to get rid of unnecessary words in public speaking and to identify unprepared and dishonest speakers (and writers). I hope this article helped you, the reader, to be cautious about this. Your feedback is much appreciated. So please use the Comments section.