The part in the book that I found most interesting was the bit about avoiding vocalized pauses. I often think about this when I listen to professors because if they have a large amount of vocalized pauses I find that being the only thing I pay attention to. The part to remember about vocalized pauses during a speech is that if you choose to remain silent for a few seconds until you figure out what to say instead of a vocalized pause (i.e. um, yeah, you know etc.) you won’t lose credibility. In contrast, if you say um or any other vocalized pause during your speech, you will lose credibility with your audience and you will sound uninformed. Like I mentioned before, if there are too many vocalized pauses, it may be the only thing your audience finds themselves able to pay attention to. With all the content in a speech that a person is trying to get across, the last thing they want is for the audience to be counting how many times they say ‘ummm’ because it has become so distracting!