I want you to try something. Take any sentence — any sentence at all — and say it out loud three times.
The first time, pause at every comma and every period. Exactly where the grammar tells you to.
The second time, ignore the punctuation entirely. Pause in the middle of a word if you feel like it. Run sentences together. Stop in places that make no grammatical sense whatsoever.
The third time, find something in between. Pause where it feels right. Not where the punctuation dictates. Not randomly. Just… where the thought naturally wants a breath.
If you did that honestly, you probably noticed something. The first version sounded like a textbook. The second sounded like a lunatic. And the third sounded like a person.
That third version is what Ken Weber is after when he writes, in Maximum Entertainment, about ignoring punctuation. And his reason is as blunt as it is brilliant: “Predictability is poison.”
The Poison of Predictability
Here is what happens when you pause at every comma and stop at every period. Your delivery falls into a pattern. Clause, pause, clause, pause, sentence, stop. Clause, pause, clause, pause, sentence, stop. The rhythm becomes metronomic. And once the audience detects the pattern — which happens faster than you think — their brains do what brains are designed to do: they predict what comes next.
Not the content. The rhythm. The cadence. The shape of the sound.
When the brain successfully predicts the rhythm of incoming information, it downgrades the priority of that information. The signal becomes background noise. The audience is still hearing you, but they have stopped listening. Their attention has slipped from active processing to passive reception, and passive reception is where your performance goes to die.
This is why some speakers can have brilliant content and still put you to sleep. The content is strong, but the delivery is predictable, and the brain responds to predictability by disengaging. It is a survival mechanism. The brain is built to pay attention to the unexpected and ignore the expected. If your voice is doing exactly what the audience expects it to do, their attention goes elsewhere.
Weber’s solution is simple: break the pattern. Pause where the audience does not expect a pause. Run through places where they expect a stop. Change the rhythm constantly so the brain never locks onto a pattern, never gets comfortable, never shifts into passive mode.
The Exercise
I first tried this exercise in a hotel room in Innsbruck, working on a piece I had already memorized. I had the script down cold — every word, every beat, every transition. The words were handled. Now I needed to work on how those words sounded.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror — the bathroom mirror has seen more of my rehearsals than any audience — and delivered the piece with standard punctuation. Pausing at commas. Stopping at periods. Following the grammar.
Then I delivered it again, but this time I deliberately ignored all punctuation. I paused in the middle of phrases. I ran periods into the next sentence without stopping. I broke sentences in half and left the first half hanging in the air for a beat before delivering the second half.
The difference was immediate.
With standard punctuation, I sounded competent. Professional. Organized. Also predictable, flat, and slightly boring.
With broken punctuation, I sounded alive. Interesting. Like I was actually thinking in real time rather than reciting. Like the words were forming in my head as I spoke them rather than being read from an internal teleprompter.
Let me give you a concrete example. Take a line like this: “I am going to ask you to think of a number. Any number at all. And I want you to hold that number in your mind.”
Delivered with standard punctuation, you pause after “number” (period), after “all” (period), and after “mind” (period). Three sentences, three stops, perfectly clean, perfectly forgettable.
Now deliver it like this: “I am going to ask you to think of a — number, any number at all and I want you to hold that number… in your mind.”
The pause after “a” creates a tiny moment of anticipation. Running “at all” into “and I want” creates momentum. The pause before “in your mind” creates emphasis. Same words. Same meaning. Completely different experience.
This is not random. It is deliberate. You are choosing where to pause based on what you want the audience to feel, not where the grammar tells you to breathe.
Why This Works
When you pause in the middle of a thought rather than at the end of a sentence, you create a subtle tension. The listener’s brain has received the beginning of an idea and is waiting for the rest. That waiting is engagement. That waiting is attention. That waiting is the opposite of the passive reception that predictable delivery produces.
When you run through a period and connect two sentences without stopping, you create momentum. The listener is pulled forward by the flow of language. There is no natural stopping point, so there is no opportunity for their attention to wander. You are carrying them on a current of words that does not let them off until you decide to let them off.
When you slow down unexpectedly in the middle of a phrase, you create emphasis. The slowdown signals importance. The listener’s brain perks up: something significant is happening, pay attention. This is far more effective than simply raising your volume to create emphasis, which is the amateur’s default.
All of these effects — tension, momentum, emphasis — are tools. And like any tools, they become more powerful with practice. The first time I tried breaking my punctuation, my pauses were awkward and my run-ons were breathless. It took weeks of rehearsal before I could place pauses and run-throughs with precision, using them to shape the audience’s experience rather than just scrambling the rhythm.
The Deeper Principle: Your Voice Is an Instrument
What I eventually realized is that the “ignore punctuation” exercise is not really about punctuation. It is about treating your voice as an instrument.
When a musician plays a written piece, they do not follow the notation robotically. They add dynamics, vary the tempo, and group notes into phrases that create shape rather than just a sequence of pitches. The written notes are the structure. The music is what the player adds. And what the player adds is unpredictability, variation, surprise — the human element that turns notation into music.
Your script is the notation. Your voice is the instrument. And the performance is what happens when you stop following the notation like a machine and start playing it like a human.
This means varying everything. Not just where you pause.
Pitch. Let your voice rise when the content is building toward something. Let it drop when you are confiding something personal or important. A flat pitch is a flat line on a heart monitor — technically present, functionally dead.
Volume. Get quieter for moments of intimacy. Get louder for moments of excitement. But here is the counterintuitive part that Weber highlights: when you feel the audience drifting, get quieter, not louder. The change itself — the unexpected drop in volume — alerts them that something new is happening. Their attention snaps back not because you shouted but because you whispered.
Speed. Rush through information that is setup or context. Slow down for the moments that matter. When you slow down, you are telling the audience: this is important. Listen here. This is where the value is.
And pausing. Not at punctuation marks. At moments of maximum impact. Before a reveal. After a joke. In the middle of a sentence that you want the audience to feel rather than just hear.
The Rehearsal Process
Here is how I work on this now. It has become a standard part of my rehearsal process, separate from memorization and separate from the physical rehearsal of effects.
I take a fully memorized piece and I perform it three different ways.
First, I deliver it straight. Standard punctuation, standard rhythm. This is the baseline. It tells me what the piece sounds like at its most neutral.
Second, I deliver it with exaggerated variation. Huge pauses. Whispered passages. Running three sentences together at top speed. This version sounds ridiculous, but it serves a purpose: it shows me where the piece responds to variation. Some lines light up when you pause before them. Some gain power when you rush through them. The exaggerated version reveals the possibilities.
Third, I deliver it with calibrated variation. Something in between, where pauses and pace changes are placed with intention and delivered with subtlety. This is the version that sounds natural — like I am making it up as I go along, even though every shift has been rehearsed.
I record the third version and listen back. Then I adjust. This is detailed, unglamorous work that nobody sees and nobody applauds. But it is the difference between a performance that the audience enjoys and a performance that the audience feels.
What I Discovered at a Conference in Graz
The first time I performed material I had rehearsed with deliberate punctuation-breaking, I was at a corporate conference in Graz. About two hundred people, a big stage, good sound system. I was doing a mentalism piece that I had performed many times before — same words, same structure, same effect.
But the delivery was different. I had spent a week in hotel rooms breaking and rebuilding the rhythm of every sentence. I had placed pauses where there used to be flow and created flow where there used to be pauses.
The effect worked the same way it always did. But something else happened that I had not experienced before. During the buildup — the thirty seconds before the climax — the room was silent. Not polite-audience silent. Actually silent. The kind of silence where you can hear the air conditioning and someone shifting in their chair in the back row.
That silence was new. The only variable that had changed was the delivery. I had placed a long pause — maybe three seconds, which feels like an eternity on stage — in the middle of a sentence that I had previously delivered straight through. And in that pause, the audience leaned in. Because the pause was unexpected, and their brains needed to know what came next.
That is the power of unpredictability. The antidote to poison is variation, surprise, and the willingness to break the rules of grammar in service of the rules of performance.
The Bridge from Scripting to Delivery
This exercise sits at the exact border between scripting and delivery. It is the moment where the words leave the page and become sound. It is where writing ends and performing begins.
Everything I have written about in this series — writing scripts, memorizing them, recording them, letting them marinate — all of that work leads to this point. The point where you have the words locked in and you start shaping how those words sound in the air.
The words are the structure. The delivery is the architecture. And the “ignore punctuation” exercise is the tool that bridges the two.
If you have been scripting and memorizing but your delivery still sounds flat, this is probably where the gap is. You are following the grammar. You are letting the punctuation dictate your rhythm. You are being predictable.
Stop pausing at commas. Stop stopping at periods. Start pausing where the emotion lives. Start flowing where the momentum wants to carry you. Start treating your voice as an instrument and your script as a score that you interpret rather than a set of instructions that you follow.
Predictability is poison. The antidote is already in your hands. You just have to stop letting the commas tell you when to breathe.