More on being vague

Doing interviews with teachers I am amazed how much vague language we use. The sort ofs and kind ofs just bounce off our lips continually. It must be to do with how we present ourselves - a way of checking to see what our listener thinks of what we just said or not wanting to give a definite opinion, perhaps. What I found interesting as well, is that when I was transcribing I started to 'tune out' the sort ofs and the justs, and left them out when they didn't make any difference to the actual content. So the written word becomes more definite than the spoken linguistically as well as from a media perspective!