Ideally, what people are doing should be obvious, if they are actually doing work. Check-in messages, issue tracker activity, etc, gives a more real picture of what is actually happening than the copy-pasted no-information answers presented through stand-ups generally.

Don't Lumbergh your way through it - "So, Peter, what's happening? Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?"