Brain Stutters

[Peg Herring]

I taught high school speech for many years and observed a wide variety of "brain stutters," bits of nonsense that are sometimes irritatingly noticeable in a person's oral communication. Common, of course, are "um," "you know," "I think," and "uh" (my students used to count the "ums" of a certain teacher's instruction in order to counter their boredom with his class). Others are unique to an individual and have no logical connection to anything else in the sentence, like a man I know who adds "on 'em" to the end of every sentence. Science explains them as thinking pauses. The speaker doesn't want to stop, since his ideas are flowing, but he gets a bit ahead of himself, so the brain sticks in the stutter to give itself time to catch up.

I notice something similar in writing, especially immature writing, that results in awkward, repeated constructions that scream for editing. A novel I was once asked to edit drove me crazy with a repeated verb/infinitive construction. No one in the story ever DID anything, they "began to" do it, e.g. "He began to walk to the door." "She began to think about her situation." Think Nike: just DO it!

I suspect this is a bit like the verbal stutter; a habit someone gets into as his brain runs ahead of his writing, but each writer needs to find such things in his own work and root them out before he can move to the next level. If you let your brain run ahead of your story, you'll end up stuttering, and those little "repeats" will drive your reader crazy after a while.