[webspiderus]

In my high school public speaking class, we also had a goal to remove these stop words from our speech by the end of the semester - but in our case, the teacher would simply stop you if you ever said one of these stop words in class, at which point you would have to say what you were going to say again without any stop words.

it didn't take long for most people to learn, and it's probably one of the more valuable lessons I've carried with me from high school. I've learned to be more comfortable taking a pause if I need it, which I think has had only positive effects.

On the other hand, sometimes it can be annoying just how aware you are of other people using stop words :)