Editing as Excavating

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Editing may involve serious digging. There is a useful article by Yi Shun Lai in The Writer magazine on September 20, 2024 titled The editor, the excavator and subtitled Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to see what your story is REALLY about. She begins:

 

“The essay begins nicely. It’s fabulously written, ostensibly about the way a young man feels having his life chronicled each week in his mother’s newspaper column.

 

About three-quarters of the way through, the writer recounts an event that makes my ears prick up, something so significant that it gives the words and events in the pages before a new angle. And then he kind of just drops it. I can feel him physically dragging the essay back to what it was about before, trying to give due diligence to the narrative plan he’s laid out for himself.

 

The essay holds my attention all the way through, but by the end of it, I’m feeling hungover, literally, because hangovers are accompanied by the sense that you know you did something last night; you just can’t place exactly what it is. I read the writer’s cover letter, thinking there might be some hint as to whether or not I’ve misread the essay, but it doesn’t elucidate the issue for me, so I ping the writer an email asking for a phone conference.

Long story short, we published the writer, but what went into our literary magazine was a reasonably far cry from the submission I received. The lead-in had changed. The event that had gripped my attention was given more clout, and was recounted all the way through. The final touch was a new title for the piece, since the essay was no longer about what it used to be about.”

 

 

 

 

 

Dropping an event is known as Chekhov’s gun, which I blogged about on July 12, 2019 in a post titled Chekhov’s Gun – speechwriting advice from a cartoon. Both Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Yale Book of Quotations state it as:

 

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

 

An image of a Caterpillar 330 Excavator came from Wikimedia Commons, and a Winchester rifle came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Disinformation from the Gem State Patriot News

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a post from Bob ‘Nugie’ Neugebauer at the Gem State Patriot News blog on July 27, 2025 simply titled Disinformation. The third sentence in his last paragraph says that:

 

“You will not find any disinformation in our newsletter and if you ever should we ask that you please let us know where we have gone wrong.”

 

But I already tried to do that, and was rejected. In a previous post on June 22,2025 titled Idaho Faces Growth and Ideological Challenges the fourth paragraph began by claiming that:

 

“Our nation’s welfare system represents a catastrophic failure that has entrenched poverty rather than eliminating it. Since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, poverty rates have remained frozen around 15% instead of continuing their post-World War II decline.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I discussed that claim in a post on June 25, 2025 titled The U.S. poverty rate has not been ‘Frozen around 15%’ since the Great Society. As shown above, from 1990 to 2023 it had moved up to 15.1% and down to 10.5%.  And I sent Mr. Neugebauer the following comment:

 

“Bob:

 

You are quite wrong about the rate for poverty. The only time the poverty rate was ‘frozen’ at around 15% was between 2010 and 2014. It was ‘frozen’ at 12.6% from 2003 to 2005 and at 11.5% from 2020 to 2022. In 2019 (under Trump) the poverty rate had fallen to 10.5%, which is 4.5% lower than the 15% you cited. Clearly you don’t know what you are talking about. For details see a post at my Joyful Public Speaking blog on June 25 titled The U.S. poverty rate has not been ‘Frozen around 15%’ since the Great Society.”

 

He rejected it and never posted that comment on his blog.

 

 

A book of speeches by the late Sidney Poitier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library I found a book from 2024 containing an unexpected collection of speeches. It is a posthumous collection titled Sidney Poitier: The Great Speeches of an Icon Who Moved Us Forward. There are portions from it at Google Books. On page 3 it says:

 

“Sidney Poitier had an inauspicious early life. Raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas in the 1920s and 1930s, he was – from an American perspective, and certainly from a Hollywood one – disadvantaged with the wrong childhood environment, skin color, and accent, but nevertheless he was destined to help change the world’s most powerful country and one of its most influential industries – the movies – forever.”

 

In his Saint Mark’s School Commencement speech, June 2002, he described Cat Island (page 140):

 

“I spent my twelve years on an island in the Caribbean. Cat Island was forty-six miles long and three to five miles wide. There were only about two hundred families on the whole island. The population of our village was about thirty to forty families. I had just one friend to play with, and he lived a long distance away. On the island there were no cars, no trucks, no buses, no trains, no paved roads, no electricity, no running water, no television, no ice cream, no movie houses. At night we used candlelight, firelight, or moonlight to get about to see where we were going. Night or day, everybody walked wherever they needed to go, or rode a horse or donkey if they were lucky enough to own one. In fact, there were stretches in my life when I was a kid when I would go for a whole week and never see a single soul other than my immediate family. As a result, some of my best friends were birds and lizards and frogs; some of my worst enemies were wasps, mosquitoes, sea urchins and tarantula spiders. I used to have regular conversations with all of them,”

 

And in his New York University Commencement speech in May 1995 (pages 116 to 120) he described going from a dishwasher to an actor:

 

 “….I was a dishwasher. That’s how I survived my early years in NYC. Minimal skills were required. Dishwashing provided a salary and three meals a day. I was between job assignments on the morning in question, and my pockets were nearly empty. So empty, in fact, that if no dishwashing position was available, I was ready to glom onto any kind of work that a Black kid with no education might qualify for. I purchased a copy of the Amsterdam News, one of Harlem’s leading newspapers, and started scanning the want-ad page for dishwasher openings.

 

The last page of want-ad boxes faced the theatrical page, which contained an article with a heading that read ‘actors wanted.’ The gist of which was that a theatre group called the American Negro Theatre was in need of actors for its next production. My mind got to spinning. My eyes bounced back and forth between the want-ad page and the theatrical page. ‘What the hell,’ I thought. ‘I’ve tried dishwashers wanted, porters wanted, janitors wanted. Why not try actors wanted?’ I figured I could do that. It didn’t sound any more difficult than washing dishes or parking cars. And they didn’t say they required any particular kind of training. But when I went in and was auditioned on the spot, the man in charge quickly let me know, and in no uncertain terms, that I was misguided in my assumptions. I had no training in acting. I could barely read! And to top it off I had a thick, singsong Bahamian accent. He snatched the script from my hands, spun me around, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and the back of my pants, and marched me on tippy-toes towards the door. He was seething. ‘You just get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get a job you could handle,’ he barked. ‘Get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.’ That was the line he ended with as he threw me out and slammed the door.

 

I have to tell you, his comments stung worse than any wasp on any sapodilla tree in my childhood. I hadn’t mentioned to him that I was a dishwasher. How did he know? If he didn’t know, then what was it about me that seemed to have implied to this stranger that a dishwasher’s profession would accurately sum up my whole life’s worth?

 

Whatever it was, I knew I had to change it or life was going to be mighty grim. And so, I set out on a course of self-improvement. I worked nights, and on my evening lunch breaks I sat in a quiet area of the restaurant where I was employed – near the entrance to the kitchen – reading the newspapers, trying to sound out each syllable of each unfamiliar word. An old Jewish waiter, noticing my efforts, took pity and offered to help. He became my tutor as well as my guardian angel of the moment. Each night we sat in the same booth in that quiet area of the restaurant, and he helped me learn to read better than I was able to before.

 

My immediate objective was to prove that I could be an actor. Not that I had any real desire to go on the stage, not that I had ever given it a thought. I simply needed to prove to that stranger that Sidney Poitier had a hell of a lot more to him than washing dishes. And it worked. The second time around they let me in.

 

But it was still no slam dunk. In fact, I made the first cut only because there were so few guys and they needed some male bodies to round out the incoming class of new students. But not even that could keep me for long, given my lack of education and experience. After a couple of months they were going to flunk me out, and once again I felt that vulnerability – as if I’d fallen overboard into deep water. If I lose this, where am I? One more Black kid who can barely read, washing dishes on the island of Manhattan? ‘Not if I can help it,’ thought I. So, in desperation I conjured up a truly outrageous offer they couldn’t refuse. I would become their janitor without pay if they would let me continue to study. After some brief negotiations, it was so agreed.

 

Things began to improve, and maybe even I began to improve. As an actor, that is. But when it came time to cast the first big student production, in walked a new guy, another kid from the Caribbean. Not a member of the group, but someone to whom the director had assigned the part I had secretly hoped to get. After all my studies, busting my butt trying to learn to act, not to mention busting my butt sweeping the walk and stoking the furnace, she cast him in the lead. Well, I had to admit, he was a pretty good-looking kid, and he had a good voice. He could even sing a little.

 

I tried to find some consolation in the fact that they made me his understudy. But little did I know, on the night of the first major run through, the one night an important director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid who had been cast for the lead – a kid named Harry Belafonte – couldn’t make it. I had to go on for him and, son of a gun, the visiting director liked what I did, and he called me to audition for a play he was planning to present on Broadway.

 

‘I’m opening Lysistrata on Broadway,’ he said. ‘There might be a small part you could try out for, if you’re available.’

 

‘Are you kidding?’ I thought to myself.

 

Next thing you know, five weeks later, on opening night, I’m staring out from a Broadway stage onto a sea of white faces in a packed theater – staring back at me – scared beyond belief as I fumbled unsuccessfully for my lines.

 

The word ‘bad’ cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was bad. The stage fright had me so that I was giving the wring cues, jumbling the lines, and within an instant the audience was rolling in the aisles.

 

The moment the scene I was in came to its tortuous end, it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.

 

The critics trashed the show. I mean, they hated it. But they liked me. I was so godawful they thought I was good. They said they admired my ‘fresh comedic gift.’

 

If you saw this in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? Someone was looking out for me, for sure.

 

My ‘triumph’ in Lysistrata leads immediately to an understudy’s job in the touring company of Anna Lucasta. Then after a long, lean, and frustrating period I found out, quite by accident, that 20 th Century Fox was about to begin casting for a movie called No Way Out. That, as it turned out, was my first motion picture job. Fifty-years and fifty-six movies later, here I am recalling the year, the day, the words, and the resolve that forged a new and undreamed-of-beginning and launched a journey more incredible than I could have imagined – through the streets of New York, along the highways and byways of life, on to a destiny written in a time before I came, by hands other than my own.”

 

The 2009 portrait came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Two useful library jargon phrases: Reader’s Advisory and Reference Interview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes it helps to know insider jargon in order to find useful information, like for asking a librarian about a possible speech topic.

 

I found an accessible free downladable book by Reed Hepler and David Horalek titled Introduction to Library and Information Science. Both are at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls. That book also can be downloaded here.

 Chapter 16 on Reader’s Advisory (pages 136 to 139) begins by describing how: 

“Reader's Advisory is a service that helps readers find appropriate recommendations based on their interests, reading level, and other factors. Each library has a unique method of managing Reader’s Advisory requests. Some systems incorporate Lexile ratings, which indicate the difficulty of understanding a particular book. These ratings are typically associated with age levels for a particular work. However, age should not be a determining factor when conducting Reader’s Advisory.”

There also is a long, excellent Wikipedia article on Reader’s Advisory. And Chapter 9 on Reference Librarianship (pages 84 to 91) describes a Reference Interview as follows on page 86: 

“The five parts of a reference interview are:

Initial question: User asks the question to reference librarian/technician.

Clarification of question: Librarian starts a dialog in an effort to clarify the real needs of the user and to try to obtain more information.

Translating the question into potential library sources: Librarian takes the lead by suggesting potential sources and determining what has already been consulted, and then they devise a search strategy.

The search: The reference librarian or technician leads the user through the search of appropriate sources. At the same time, they implement point-of-use instruction with each resource consulted so that the user gains some knowledge for future independent searching.

Follow-up: As the search progresses, the librarian should ask the patron, ‘Is this what you are looking for?’ to be sure that the search is on the right track. When leaving the patron, the librarian should always add, ‘Let me know if you need more help.’ This lets the user know that they can come back for more help.”

There is another Wikipedia article on the Reference Interview. And there is a 7-page pdf article at the National Archive at Boston titled Guidelines of the Successful Reference Interview from American Library Association.

 

Also, the American Library Association has a store web page describing the third edition of a book from 2019 (with 344-pages) titled Conducting the Reference Interview.

 

On February 23, 2020 I blogged about Finding speech topics and doing research. In that post I suggested that:

 

“…the best way to learn is to make an appointment with a reference librarian at your public library. Tell him or her your topic, and you can learn where to look, and get suggestions for better search terms.”

 

An image of a librarian came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

A curious article by Adam Berinsky about surveys and public speaking fear

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a curious article by Adam Berinsky at CMSwire on July 16, 2025 titled 4 Types of Survey Bias That Can Skew Your Customer Insights.

 

It begins as follows:

 

“Poorly designed questions can skew results and taint market research. Watch out for these four types of bias.

 

The Gist

 

Survey fears can be misleading. Early polls exaggerated fear of public speaking due to flawed question structure, not genuine ranking.

 

Four major biases affect survey accuracy. From wording confusion to social desirability, biases can distort data if not addressed up front.

 

Design matters more than you think. Marketers must ask the right questions the right way – starting with how they frame response options.

 

Don’t Believe Everything You’ve Heard About Public Speaking

 

Everybody knows that people fear public speaking even more than they fear dying. Right?

 

Well, like many such ‘facts,’ this idea is actually the result of a flawed survey question [reference to 2012 article by Dwyer and Davidson]. In 1973, a poll taker asked more than 2,500 Americans to identify their fears from a list of options, and public speaking came out on top. Forty-one percent of respondents said they feared speaking in front of a group, compared to just 19% who said they feared dying.

 

(Insects and bugs, cited by 22% of respondents, also edged out dying, but no one ever talks about that.)

 

The problem? Respondents weren’t asked to rank these fears against each other. When a research team replicated the survey in 2010, public speaking once again topped the list. But this time, researchers asked a second group of respondents to rank their top three fears. When the fears were positioned against each other like this, death claimed the top spot.”

  

But that one 1973 Bruskin survey (as shown above) - not “early polls” asked how many people had each fear, with an answer in percent on a horizontal scale. Heights was second at 32.0%, insects & bugs was third at 22.1%, financial problems was fourth at 22.0%, deep water was fifth at 21.5%, sickness was sixth at 18.8%, and death was seventh at 18.7%.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It did NOT ask how much they feared each one, which would call for another type of answer: a fear score (as shown above) on a vertical scale. Their question was not flawed, but wasn’t the same as could answer what people feared more. Right after whining that “Marketers must ask the right questions the right way,” Adam got it wrong!

 

Way back on October 27, 2009 I blogged about The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from? Overall it is my most popular post, and still number two for the last year. The 1973 survey had asked a national sample, while the 2010 survey instead asked 815 students at a large Midwestern university (perhaps the University of Nebraska).

 

By the way, the 1973 survey was really replicated in 1993 on a national sample, in a survey done by the successor to the original polling firm. I blogged about it on May 19, 2011 in a post titled America’s Number One Fear: Public Speaking – that 1993 Bruskin-Goldring Survey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results from another pair of surveys were reported in a March 19, 2001 article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup News titled Snakes Top List of Americans’ Fears. The first was done between November 20 and 22 of 1998; the second was done between February 19 and 21 of 2001 (and its results are shown above). They did not rank these 13 fears against each other.

 

Fear scores have been around since a 1965 article by James H. Geer titled The Development of a Scale to Measure Fear. I blogged about it October 10, 2012 in a post on 51 fears titled In a 1965 study of university students, fear of public speaking ranked sixth for men and seventh for women. And in another post on October 23, 2012 titled Either way you look at it, public speaking really is not our greatest fear I discussed both surveys with results in percent and those with fear scores.

 

If a survey asks about several levels of fear, like the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears (as was shown above), then we can also calculate fear scores. On October 24, 2024 I blogged about how In the tenth Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2024, public speaking was only ranked #59 of 85 fears at 29.0%. And in another post on November 9, 2024 titled Overblown claims about fears from investigators for the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears I discussed some fear scores.

 

The ancient 1973 Bruskin survey is still mentioned as if public speaking still was the number one fear (in percent), although that is belied by the last decade of Chapman Surveys, which found the rank to be as follows:

 

2014      [ # 1] not really, see this blog post

2015      [#26]

2016       [#33]

2017       [#52]

2018       [#59]

2019       [#54]

2020/21 [#54]

2022       [#46]

2023       [#53]

2024       [#59]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, as shown above, the fear score for public speaking just is at the Slightly Afraid level, as I discussed in a blog post on June 1, 2025 titled An article on stage fright by David Pennington claimed public speaking was the #1 fear in a Chapman Survey, but ignored their nine other surveys where it was ranked from #26 to #59.

 

 

Use relatable units when reporting numbers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 13, 2024 I blogged about Chopping a number down to size by using the right unit conversion. In that post I noted that the federal government web site reports wildfires in units of acres. That’s hard to grasp if the fire covers thousands of them. There are 640 acres to a square mile, so sizes for larger fires instead should be shown in square miles, and not acres.

 

On July 19, 2025 there is an article by Nicole Blanchard at the Idaho Statesman titled Car on fire sparks 8,000-acre wildfire along I-84 near Boise on Saturday. A bit later that day there is another article by Barclay Idsal and Allie Triepke at IdahoNews6 titled 8,902 acre wildfire ongoing southeast of Boise leads to low visibility along I-84. 8902 acres converts to 13.91 square miles, or a square with 3.73 miles on a side (as is shown above).

 

That MM65 I-84 Fire is just east of the Blacks Creek Road exit (Exit 64) for I-84. If I plan to go east on I-84, then I commonly avoid east Boise traffic by going south on the ironically-named Pleasant Valley Road past the state prisons, and then east on Kuna Mora Road to reach Exit 64.    

 

 

In a BBC phone interview Donald Trump said “I trust almost nobody”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A video by BBC News on July 15, 2025 is titled Listen: ‘I trust almost nobody,’ Trump says when asked about Putin. If you trust nobody, then you will do your own research and will make bad decisions – like starting a trade war with tariffs on our neighbors, friends, and almost everyone else.

 

An article by Abbey Lewis at Harvard Business Impact is titled Good leadership? It all starts with trust. She says to be transparent, authentic, and reliable. And a second article by Col. Joe LeBoeuf and Lt. Col. Joe Doty at the Association of the United States Army on January 26, 2022 is titled When it comes to effective leadership, trust matters.

 

We are now just six months, or one eighth through Trump’s second term as president. The other seven-eighths likely will not make America great.  

 

 

There are haves and have nots; but there are just two halves, and no halve nots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you do not proofread, you can get total nonsense. There is a post by Dr. John Livingston at the Gem State Patriot News blog on July 20, 2025 titled Heart and Soul with a second paragraph that begins:

 

“The progressive line has always been that there are halves and halve nots and the halves are always exploiting the halve nots.”

 

No, it has not ever been. Halves is the plural for half. We can get biblical by quoting from Matthew 13:12 in the King James version:

 

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

 

The cartoon was partly colored in from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

A humorous YouTube video from Don McMillan about Venn Diagrams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on December 10, 2013 I blogged about Communicating ideas using Venn diagrams and other simple graphics. In another blog post on February 28, 2015 titled Don’t make things any more complicated than necessary I discussed Simon Sinek’s use of a bullseye (concentric circles) Venn diagram.

 

There is a humorous five-minute YouTube video by Don McMillan Comedy on July 8, 2025 titled Venn Diagrams About Venn Diagrams.

 

At 0:30 he explains that diagrams are overlapping circles with different colors (as shown above).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 2:05 he explains that a comedian has to be funny, socially challenged, and not afraid of public speaking (as shown above).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 2:50 he explains that a motivational speaker has to be funny, not socially challenged, and not afraid of public speaking (as shown above). Unlike a comedian you will tell people how they should live their lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 3:00 he explains that a mime has to be funny, socially challenged, and afraid of public speaking (as shown above).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 3:10 he explains that Elon Musk is not funny, socially challenged, and not afraid of public speaking (as shown above).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He has another seven-minute YouTube video titled The Career Venn Diagram – Comedy in Place (E61) which at 1:25 has six circle diagram (as shown above) with Math Skills, Problem Solving, People Skills, Drinking, Heartless, and OCD.

 

 

Spouting nonsense - A YouTube video from Amrez with fairy tales about two surveys on public speaking fears

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an awful seven-minute YouTube video from Amrez on July 6, 2025 titled Why Do People Fear Public Speaking More Than Death which begins as follows:

 

“Why do people fear public speaking more than death? If you’re one of these people, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Hi, I make questionnaire videos and today we’re going to answer this question. Why do so many people fear public speaking more than death?

 

First let’s look at some stats. A survey conducted by the polling company Gallup asked 1,000 Americans what their greatest fear was. They had these options: death, public speaking, heights, spiders, dogs, flying, illness, old age, running, losing a loved one or other. And guess what was the top response? Public speaking. Yep, 40 percent of respondents chose public speaking over death.

 

A survey conducted by Chapman University in 2017 asked students to choose up to three fears from a list of 54 phobias. These were common fears like fear of commitment, fear of driving, fear of failure, etc. And guess what was the most commonly selected fear? Yep, glossophobia: fear of speaking in front of people. Okay, so the stats don’t lie…”

 

The rest of it is not quite as awful.

 

But the article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup News Service on March 19, 2001 is titled Snakes Top List of Americans’ Fears and is subtitled Public speaking, heights, and being closed in small spaces also create fear in many Americans. It discussed surveys done in both 1998 and 2001, neither of which included death. In 2001 40% feared public speaking (versus 51% for snakes).

 

For 2001 the list of 13 fears and their percentages are as follows:

 

Snakes: 51%

Public speaking in front of an audience: 40%

Heights: 36%

Being closed in a small space: 34%

Spiders and insects: 27%

Needles and getting shots: 21%

Mice: 20%

Flying on an airplane: 18%

Crowds: 11%

Dogs: 11%

Thunder and lightning: 11%

Going to the doctor: 9%

The dark: 5%

 

And for 1998 the list of 13 fears is as follows:

 

Snakes: 56%

Public speaking in front of an audience: 45%

Heights: 41%

Being closed in a small space: 36%

Spiders and insects: 34%

Mice: 26%

Needles and getting shots: 21%

Flying on an airplane: 20%

Thunder and lightning: 17%

Going to the doctor: 12%

Crowds: 11%

Dogs: 10%

The dark: 8%

 

The 2017 Chapman Survey asked a national sample of American adults rather than just students about eighty individual fears, not 54 phobias. Their results are summarized by a blog post on October 11, 2017 that is titled America’s Top Fears 2017. The most commonly selected fear was Corrupt Government Officials at 74.5%. Public speaking was #52 at just 20.0%. I blogged about it on October 14, 2017 in a post titled What do the most Americans fear? The fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears and being innumerate. There were really 81 fears, and a lot of the percentages listed in the Chapman blog post did not quite match their raw data.  

 

That Amrez video is telling us fairy tales about those surveys. I have awarded them a Spoutly for spouting nonsense.

 

 

A magazine article with 18 practical strategies for accepting and managing stage fright among musicians

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting and useful article by Eva Bojner Horwitz and Paulina Valtasaari at Frontiers in Psychology on June 24, 2025 titled Acceptance and management of stage fright among musicians: a manual of practical strategies. Most of their 18 strategies also apply to speech fright (fear of public speaking). The article has a series of eighteen useful stick figures that are shown in Figure 1. And Table 1 presents themes for them describing how you should feel and act, and the result. (The seven-page .pdf file has a much clearer version of Table 1 than the text does).

 

Table 2 presents their 18 strategies grouped into five categories related to stage fright. For brevity, I have just listed each theme and how to feel. They are as follows:

 

Awareness and Attention

Conscious Awareness: Locate emotions in your body and observe thoughts.

Listen! Hear and feel the sound resonate in your body.

Feel Your Body: Scan body sensations neutrally.

Breath: Sense breathing patterns and muscle tension.

Concentration: Notice sensations and interactions with your instrument.

Focus on Your Mind: Observe thoughts and their effects on the body.

 

Stress and Relaxation

Unwind: Recognize arousal and post-stress recovery needs.

Relax: Recognize when relaxation is possible or obstructed.

Heat Control: Adapt to warmth or cols.

When Alarm Goes Off: Recognize early signs of stress.

 

Self-Reflection

Self-Reflection: Process successes and failures constructively.

Suggestion: Notice self-critical thoughts’ physical effects.

 

Visualisation and Goal Setting

Set a Goal: Balance excitement and self-efficacy.

Visualize: Imagine playing vividly, noting sensations and movements.

Inner Vision: Focus on specific parts or tasks in your body.

 

Recalling Positive Experiences

Memorize Good Memories: Relive successes and supportive interactions.

Happy and Pleased: Sense happiness in your body.

Satisfied: Identify physical sensations of satisfaction.

 

The pianist image was cropped from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

A long, excellent, recent discussion of filler words in the book Like, Literally, Dude by linguistics professor Valerie Fridland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The president of the Pioneer Toastmasters Club, Brian Reublinger, told me about a 2023 book by linguistics professor Valerie Fridland titled Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the good in bad English. Linguistics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. English professors, public speaking coaches, and other pedants will tell us what we should be doing. For example, there is an article on filler words by Joel Schwartzberg in the February 2019 issue of Toastmaster magazine on pages 14 and 15 titled Drop Those Crutches. In contrast, linguists tell us what we are doing, why we do it, and where it came from. I got Like, Literally, Dude from my friendly local public library and am enjoying reading it. You can find excerpts from it at Google Books.  

 

Chapter 2 on Pages 65 to 97 is titled Umloved. It has the following section titles:

What the uh?

 The ums of antiquity?

A Freudian um?

Brain farts

Comprendo?

Men-o-pausal patterns

Staging an um-prising?

Umdone

 

On pages 80 and 81 the Comprendo? section says:

 

“Go to any public-speaking class and I can pretty much guarantee that they will not be advising you to ‘um’ more. As a matter of fact, pretty much any public-speaking course worth its salt will give you tips and pointers on how not to be disfluent, rather than give you gold stars for how many ums you can produce during one PowerPoint presentation. But that is why they pay linguists the big bucks and public-speaking coaches get crickets. Um Okay, maybe I have that backward. That’s why they should be paying us the big bucks. Because we linguists have read the psycholinguistic research that suggests we have been wrong to ban hesitation from our talk. Just because we have been conditioned by our speech teacher to avoid using them or lost our lunch money to Toastmasters International, we find little scientific evidence that suggests they actually deserve such a negative reputation. In fact, the most fascinating area of hesitation research is not on why we ‘um’ but on how our ums and uhs might actually be a speaking superpower.

 

How is this possible? Because our ums and uhs, along with other signs of disfluencies like false starts (sa – say what?) seem to signal to our listeners to be on alert that there is something requiring greater cognitive effort happening. Why would this be useful from a comprehension standpoint? Because it leads us to expect the unexpected; we don’t get sidetracked by anticipating easy words or simple sentences, because we know disfluencies tend to accompany harder linguistic choices. Let’s unpack this a bit by looking at what some of this research can tell us. 

 

Our hesitations seem to act as pretty significant comprehension aids for our listeners. For instance, in one research study, participants were aske to move a mouse to select an object from two choices on a computer screen after hearing a prompt. The trick was that one of the objects had been previously mentioned during the study and the other had not. When the experimental instructions included an um before the name of the object to select, participants were not only more likely to be faster at identifying the unmentioned object, but they also started moving the cursor in that object’s direction before the um was even finished. It seemed the um clued the listener in to which word was more likely to be said (the unmentioned one) because they understood um’s role of marking something unfamiliar. This effect did not occur when the researchers used a same-length background noise instead of the filled pause. The um made them do it."   

 

[When we skip to page 86 we find something I blogged about on February 13, 2014 in a post titled Adding a few uhs and ums improved recall of plot points in stories]:

 

"This advantage for memory and speed has been well studied – experiments testing disfluency effects on comprehension have pretty consistently illustrated recall and processing-time benefits when a filled pause is part of the stimuli. And the benefits are not just on word recall – we also seem to remember stories better when uh or um enter the picture. In an experiment [Ref. 86] testing how well people performed at recalling specific parts of the story Alice in Wonderland, participants showed better recall when they heard recordings with filled pauses occurring before some plot points, such as’ Meanwhile, … uh …, the cook keeps hurling plates and other items at the Duchess.’  Equivalently timed coughing inserted into the passages at the same points, though, didn’t help them out in recalling those plot points later. In fact, the coughs seemed to impair recall. So it is specifically the uh that does the trick.”

 

Chapter 3 on pages 99 to 123 is titled What’s Not to Like? It has sections titled:

 

Like, why?

The trouble with like

Approximately something

Laser pointers

The plot thickens

Old dogs, new tricks

What women like

To like or not to like?

 

It begins as follows [pages 99 to 104]:

 

“Walk into any middle school in America and there’s one word you’ll hear echoing down the hallway that has taken on more than its fair share of shade. No, it doesn’t rhyme with ‘luck’ or ‘hit.’ This one rhymes with ‘hike’ and should be wildly familiar to anyone who’s seen the movies Valley Girl or Clueless. While ‘fer sure’ and ‘totally gnarly’ have faded into the SoCal sunset, the presence of like has only expanded, punctuating every sentence from Los Angeles to New York.

 

The frequent use of like may sound juvenile, but it has taken over our linguistic nooks and crannies in almost every variety of global English. It appears at the beginning of sentences, in the middle of clauses, and now it even introduces quotes. The funny thing is, despite its pervasiveness, hardly anyone claims to like this new type of like. Even those who admit to using it themselves rarely remark on it as a positive attribute. Case in point: When I ask my college students to name the things that bug them the most about language, like is always at the top of the list, comically appearing in the very sentence that denigrates it: ‘I hate how people, like use like all the time.’ Once the offending word is mentioned, the students can’t stop noticing how often it pops up in everyone’s speech for the rest of the class period – and then the rest of the day, week, month, and year. The fact is, like it or not, like use is here to stay. But before condemning it as a sign of impending linguistic ruin, let’s take some time to consider why like might have entered our speech in the first place. As I tell my students, maybe, just maybe, there is more to like than we might at first believe.     

 

Like, why?

 

The expanded use of like is so widespread that news outlets ranging from The Atlantic to Time to Vanity Fair to The New York Times have covered what seems to be its troubling and meteoric rise. One online college advice site has a post headlined ‘How to Stop Saying Like and Immediately Sound Smarter’; a speech-improvement service calls it ‘The Like Epidemic,’; the Chronicle of Higher Education asks that we ‘Diss Like’; and in Vanity Fair Christopher Hitchens called it ‘The other L-word.’ Across global English varieties, concerned parents worry about this troublesome habit. One mother, echoing the apprehensions of many, appeals for help from the advice expert at the UK’s The Guardian, fretting that her teenager’s like use sounds uneducated and will affect her success in the future. Teachers also report that its prevalent use in class is becoming problematic. In fact, a friend of mine, who is a middle school teacher recently told me that it’s her students’ number one verbal tic. This collective hand-wringing leaves little doubt that we have little love for like. So then why do we continue to use it?  

 

Ask most parents and they’ll probably say it has something to do with adolescent laziness or linguistic rebellion. Ask most employers and they’ll probably say it has to do with a shift from a more formal workplace to a casual, less professional setting. Ask most linguists, though, and they’ll probably tell you we’re missing the mark. Like used in such contexts is not much different from other markers that we have used through the centuries to help us organize and structure our speech. In other words, there is nothing that unique or concerning about it.  

 

Though we might not realize it, English has an arsenal of pragmatic-oriented features of speech, such as so, you know, actually, and oh. As with our now beloved ums and uhs, these discourse markers don’t directly contribute to the literal (semantic) content of a sentence. Instead, when added, they contribute to how we understand each other by providing clues to a speaker’s intentions. For instance, when I say. ‘Oh, I finally got a job!’ my use of oh is a shorthand way to prompt a listener to mimic my surprise. Discourse markers provide the social greasing of the conversational wheel. Without them, our speech would sound less conversational and more computer-like. In fact, try having a conversation without using any discourse markers. Not only will you find it quite difficult, but others will find you a less appealing speaker.

 

Discourse markers are by no means new or unusual Shakespeare made liberal use of them, and the epic poem Beowulf even begins with one (Hwoet!). Suggestively, historical texts that date back to the old English and Middle English periods (fifth to eleventh century and twelfth to fifteenth century, respectively) have shown evidence of words functioning similarly to modern discourse markers. For instance, the Old English word pa, meaning ‘then,’ served as a foregrounding discourse marker in narratives and was often associated with colloquial speech. As a matter of fact, some Old English scholars suggest pa occurred so often in some early texts that it can’t have carried much semantic content, a complaint that echoes our modern assessment of excessive like use. Less controversial, Old English hwoet, meaning ‘what,’ seems to have served as an attention-getting device roughly similar to the modern sentence’s initial so. As the opener to Beowulf, it’s a signal to the audience that something worth paying attention to will follow. In more recent times – at least if you consider the early modern period (fifteenth through seventeenth century) recent – interjections such as alas, ah, and fie, among others, similarly functioned to give a sense of a speaker’s intentions or emotions (alas, ‘tis true). Though charming to our ears, these DMs may well have been painful to parents of the early modern era.

 

Looking back, we find that the origins of the word like are similarly rooted in the Middle English and early modern period. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first notes the use of like in its adjectival and verbal functions – as lich (adjective) and lician (verb), respectively – as early as 1200, with noun, conjunction, and prepositional uses noted around 1400 – 1500. The use of like as a conversational marker shows up later, though much earlier than we might have expected. The OED cites a passage from a text written in 1778 (F. Burney’s Evelina II), where it is used to qualify the speaker’s subsequent remark, ‘Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship’s taking offense.’ It also cites another example employing like in this way in 1840, in a magazine of the era: ‘Why like, it’s gaily nigh like, to four mile like.’ And hinting at the source of like’s vibe of hip vernacularity, the OED gives a more recent example from a beat-influenced magazine, where we locate like occurring in its now familiar spot at the beginning of a sentence – ‘Like how much can you lay on (i.e., give) me?’ (from Neurotica Autumn 45).”