I’ve had the misfortune to hear myself speaking on
recordings, in a work context, mostly, but occasionally in a recovery context.
I say ‘misfortune’; it’s uncomfortable, but it’s beneficial, because it allows
one to identify and eliminate annoying habits and tics in one’s public speech.
This information is useful if one is going to eliminate anything that will
distract from the content or, in AA, the message one is carrying or will reduce
one’s credibility. I’ve listed these out. Some are to do with intonation and
other aspects of ‘form’; others veer into content. I’ve fleshed out the list of
patterns I’ve been guilty of and have worked on with varying success, with a
few more patterns that can irk.
- High rising terminal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal)
- Laughs, giggles, chuckles, snorts, and gurgles when nothing is funny
- Insecurity fillers (‘you know’, ‘you know what I mean’, ‘right’, ‘like’, ‘sort of’)
- Hesitation markers (‘um’, ‘er’)
- Stuttering out of uncertainty or hurry
- Flat affect / apparent boredom
- Axe-grinding
- Excessive emphasis
- Ramping up with repetitions and superlatives
- Exaggeration and caricature
- Lip-smacking and other non-verbal noises
- Dropping register (reducing ‘-ing’ to ‘in’’ and ‘think’ to ‘fink’) to sound more ‘street’ (sometimes the person forgets and starts to speak middle class again by accident)
- More than the occasional swearing
- Seeing how many times one can say the full phrase ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’ (rather than just ‘AA’) per minute, or, for special effect ‘the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous’
- Repeatedly referring to the word ‘man’ (if one is a man) or ‘woman’ (if one is a woman) rather than just ‘person’ or ‘someone’ when the biological sex is neither here nor there
- Dramatising with continual reference to death, life and death, life, etc.
- Following mispronunciations with deliberate gibberish out of embarrassment rather than unobtrusively correcting
The result of minimising or eliminating these and other quirks is much more effective message carrying with far fewer distractions, and greater confidence in speaking in any context.