Marking Hesitation
Launch library · evergreen read
Filled pauses, the small sounds people make while thinking, carry information about how easily an answer came, and a transcript that removes every one of them uniformly can quietly erase a texture that mattered to how the original answer should actually be understood. That texture is easy to lose entirely once a transcript has been smoothed for general readability.
At the same time, a transcript that preserves every filled pause in full can become genuinely difficult to read, particularly for a general audience less interested in the mechanics of speech than in the substance of what was actually said. Readers interested mainly in substance rarely benefit from every single filled pause preserved in full.
A reasonable compromise preserves hesitation selectively, at moments where it genuinely signals something, while smoothing it elsewhere in the interest of a document that remains both honest and readable for its intended audience. Judging where hesitation genuinely matters, rather than applying one rule everywhere, keeps the document both honest and readable.