This is an event outline, uploaded to my website in its intro speech state. I have decided not to clean it up from that format, because I found myself liking it more as a process snapshot than anything else.
There will be a calibration round and a competition round, both an hour long, with a mandatory ten minute break in between in which you should not talk. I am NOT sure the mandatory break is a good idea but I had a strong enough hunch that people would approve it in retrospect that I want to do it once and see what happens. If you hate it, I am sorry in advance. If you hate it and so do most other people, not only am I sorry, I will never do it again.
There will be two awards: one for the person with the most improvement, and one for the person with the most filler-free starting point. The awards are slightly fancy chocolate, two dollars, or getting chased around the block once by me.
Everyone should take a piece of cardboard and hold onto it for the rest of the event. One side is for the calibration round, the other side for competition. You will be stickering people for filler words in both rounds.
Here are the stickering rules.
- Don’t double sticker someone who used a filler word if someone else already stickered them for the same word you are thinking of.
- If a case is ambiguous, you can make a case, ONCE, for why something did/not count, and the person may take back the sticker. But each person is the ultimate authority over their sticker application. Do not get into arguments.
[10m debate nailing down which words or types of phrases are disallowed – we ended up being fairly restrictive, including ‘mhm’ and speech disfluencies, which were not obviously in the event promise to me.]