What are filler words?
These are the words that are used to fill the silence when you’re speaking. They’re words that don’t add any true value to the sentence. They just keep you going as you come up with the remainder of your sentence.
When we speak continuously we end up using gap fillers. These words are short phrases and are used when we fall short of words. You would usually come across people who end up making vocal sounds to keep a conversation going such as ‘umm’, ‘ahhh’ or ‘oh etc., They end up doing this subconsciously but it’s better to avoid them as they are signs of weakness.
A good example is a word “Really.” This is one of my crutch words. I’m positive I started using it in emails. I use them like, “oh really that’s great news.” Fortunately, I trained myself not to use this crutch word quickly started to sound more confident and bold.
Here in this lesson, we don’t encourage you to use fillers, but there are times when we hesitate in the middle of a conversation and search for words to keep going. Here are some expressions that people may use as fillers: Tell me something
- Wow
- Well
- You see
- By the way
- No way
- Certainly/ Surely
- Exactly
- Basically
- To be honest
- yeah
- like
- ahh