Please don’t just tell us about ‘the pause’ – because there are several different types and lengths

When I looked at titles of YouTube videos, I found examples like the following five which implied there is one type  – “The Pause”:  

Karen Friedman: Boring to Brilliant (-) Power of the Pause

Darren LaCroix: Presentation coaching: The Pause

Jayne Latz: Learn the art of the pause!

Kwesi Millington: The power of the pause – public speaking tip

Brian Tracy: Public Speaking Tip – the power of the pause

But pauses really are plural. There are different types (and lengths) that are analogous to punctuation in written text, as is shown above. I discussed this before on May 31, 2018 in a post titled Pausing properly during your speech.

On page 29 of the July 2019 issue of Toastmaster Magazine there is an article by Bill Brown titled Silence is golden. Bill mentioned both a pause and  what he called a micro-pause, a silence no longer than a second. He also embedded Karen Friedman’s YouTube Video: Boring to Brilliant (-) Power of the Pause.

At the Presentation Guru web site on March 6, 2019 there is an article by John Zimmer titled The Power of the Pause, which also appeared as a post at his Manner of Speaking blog on November 12, 2019 with a longer, more descriptive title of Pauses in a speech: why, when, and how. John’s post has five sections titled:

A STORY FROM SPAIN

SILENCE IS GOLDEN…BUT NOT EASY

WHEN TO PAUSE

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR PAUSES WHEN SPEAKING IN PUBLIC

THE MUSIC OF YOUR SPEECH

In the section titled WHEN TO PAUSE he describes seven situations, The pause:

 1]  before you start

 2]  to signal that something important is coming

 3]  to let the message sink in

 4]  when moving to a new topic

 5]  for emphasis

 6]  to get your audience to reflect

 7]  when answering questions

Then, in the section on HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR PAUSES WHEN SPEAKING IN PUBLIC he gave some advice:

“5.  If you are a fast talker who never pauses, try this. Take a novel from your bookshelf and read out loud for a few minutes. Every time you come to a comma, pause for a second. When you come to the end of a sentence, pause for two seconds. When you reach the end of a paragraph, pause for three seconds. Yes, it will feel artificial, and no, you should not normally pause like this. However, it will help make you more aware of pausing.”

How can you designate pauses in a script, like one that would go into a teleprompter? In her YouTube video, Learn the art of the pause!, at 3:00 speech language pathologist Jayne Latz gives an example of her Strategic Marking System (using slashes /) with the following Winston Churchill quotation:

“The three most difficult things a man can do // are to climb a building leaning toward him, // kiss a woman leaning away from him, // and deliver a good speech. ///”

Linguists already have other systems for transcribing speech that can be used for designating pauses. They use parentheses with a period (or periods) inside to denote pauses of various lengths, or put in the time, t, in seconds - like 2.0. To linguists a micropause is one too short to reliably measure, perhaps 0.2 or 0.5 seconds. That’s shorter than Bill Brown’s one-second micro-pause. At his Speech and Language Therapy Information web site on February 11, 2016 there is an article by Graham Williamson titled Appendix 1: Transcription Conventions with the following notations:

(.)  micropause  t < 0.5 sec. (comparable perhaps to an average syllable duration)

(..)  brief pause  0.5 sec. < t < 1.0 sec.

(…)  pause  1.0 sec. < t < 1.5 sec.

(2.0)  longer pause showing time in seconds

//  point at which current utterance is overlapped 
    by that transcribed below