The Importance of Pause In Communication
Sometimes, you notice that people speak without pausing. It's clear that they come to the end of the sentence; yet they can't stop speaking. There are a few reasonings behind this. One, their head thinks faster than what they can speak, therefore, they machine gun it out. Second, they don't care what you have to speak, only what they need to speak it out. The latter, you would have them cut you halfway through conversation, or after a short pause you're to being conversing, then 1 second later they'll cut you off, and continue speaking doesn't work because it would be fighting for whose voice is louder. In both case, it doesn't matter.
Ultimately, conversation means letting the other person understand what you're trying to convey. Of course, in between people whom knows how to communicate, you'd know that speech is one-sided, meaning that one get to speak, and the other listen (without conversing their side). But let's just say most people didn't understand that; therefore, in normal conversations we're trying to convey to some people what we think, and we want them to understand rather than speaking to the air. It's crucial, then, to communicate it in a way that the other person can understand; and that's where pause comes in.
Thing is, when someone is receiving information, it doesn't goes in smoothly. They need to decode the message that you'd encoded to tell them; and if you didn't know, there are 1) lots of information to decode, and 2) lots of ways to decode an information. You could mean something by saying "I love you", for example, but it may be understood differently by the other person. Unknowingly, they actually consider a few choice and choose the one most plausible based on their past experience and putting you in their shoes (supposingly you should put yourself in others shoes, but in fact if you let your unconscious do the work, it's the other way round of putting others in your shoes). This isn't immediate, which takes time. Hence, after a long speech, a few seconds of pause makes their brain digest the information before continuing on the speech. Without the pause, things don't get digest and assigned to even short-term memory, therefore when you continue speaking, they'd be asking questions that you'd already told them, if you're not the second type narcissist that keeps speaking without stopping to hear their questions.
As for the second one, that's slightly different. There's an extra negative feeling attached with it. When you stop someone when it's their turn to speak, or you don't attend to their body language signaling it's their turn to speak, and you continue speaking, they'll stop listening to you or just by right go away (because they can't even say goodbye without you stopping to let them say so). This hence violates the rule of balance between both person: it tipped the balance that only you speak without their turn of speaking.
Do note though, in any case, it's almost always the speaker's fault if their audience can't understand what they speak. Of course, there may be more possible reasons that you can prove it's the listener's fault, such as their inability to listen (clinical diseases), or listeners actively refuse to listen; but comparing their probability, the speaker's fault occur more often than listener's fault. Thing is, if you already know that the listener won't be listening, you'd not speak to them in the first place. Example, if you know someone of narcissist whom never let you speak, would you even approach them to speak in the first place? Most likely no unless forced to. But the other way round, a narcissist speaker approaching a listener? Yes, it's most likely. One listener go away, there are lot more listeners out there to assert their "speaking skills".
In conclusion, it's important to learn how to speak. Although there are many tips and tricks, we today speak about the importance of pausing during your speech, to let your audience digest what you speak. Don't worry, they probably would wait for you unless you pause for too long (15 seconds, etc). And in long pause, one usually told one's friend to wait for a while for one to digest and collect what one wants to say before continuing, so just a few more extra seconds there allowed. Hence, remember to pause in your conversations!
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