Yesterday on ABC News Breakfast, Sally Sara asked Josh Frydenberg whether he’d run for office. He paused before answering.
Afterwards, political analyst Melissa Clarke picked that moment out unprompted. A telling moment, she called it. Sometimes silence tells you more than anything spoken.
She’s right, and it’s worth asking why. An unplanned pause before a direct question invites the audience to fill the gap themselves, usually with the least generous explanation. In Frydenberg’s case, the gap got filled by the audience’s own guesswork.
The answer isn’t eliminating the pause. It’s knowing what to do with it, so it reads as considered rather than caught out.
