posted
Just curious, does anyone out here have any effective solutions to stuttering? Tips, tricks, hints, things like that?
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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I stuttered as a kid, and I still do when I get overly excited/nervous/something I can't quite explain. I went to speech therapy for awhile to help me get over it.
That was a long time ago, so I don't really have any useful advice. When it happens now the only thing that helps is to just stop, take a deep breath, and then try to say the same thing using entirely different words. Once I've started stuttering on a word or phrase I will not be able to get it out correctly, regardless of if it's a "hard" word or not, but switching to different phrasings seems to "reset" my brain to normal.
If you're dealing with this yourself, good luck. Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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I used to stutter, and it seems to be coming back now. I'm not sure how to circumvent this annoying problem.
I had to do a report in class today on Rossetti, Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the R's and M's just really kicked my ass all over the place. Got pretty annoying, because those words you can't just go to an alternate synonym for.
I find that when I use a different voice, I can speak okay. But that's stupid, and seems like admitting defeat.
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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As a child I and my siblings stuttered all the time. As I became a teenager though I became aware of the problem, but it was really made worse by my still struggling with my command of English which I had to pretty much use all the time. So the solution I developed at the time was when speaking, I would always be concious of my stuttering problem, meaning that I spoke in a calm, deliberate manner, frequently to an eerie extent. It really helped. Over the years the stuttering became less pernicious but it still crops up frequently, especially when I'm excited/angry, but rarely to an embarrasing extent. (well, to be honest, frequently a word that is perfect for something I want to describe I won't be able to utter at all and I'm forced to find a lame subsitute...)
Posts: 722 | Registered: Jul 2004
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I got my Bachelor's Degree in Speech-Language Pathology. I took a class about stuttering. What I came away with was this: there isn't a "cure". But there are some things might help.
One important thing was not making it "worse" by being emotionally troubled by it. If you have a tendancy to stutter, that tendancy will probably not leave you. But if you learn to accept it, and not stress about it, you can help keep it from getting worse.
One odd method: a feedback machine. You speak into it, and after a brief time delay, usually some fraction of a second, it plays back your words. Sometimes my telephone does this to me. I find it incredibly annoying and it makes me feel very self conscious on the phone even though I am the only one who can hear the "echo". But apparently, some people have had a lot of success treating stuttering with this method. No one really knows why it helps.
I don't know how practical this is, but most people that stutter don't have *any* stuttering problems if they sing their words. But if stuttering already makes you uncomfortable, breaking out into song in public might not be for you.
Mostly, the class dealt with helping people who stutter so severely that they have developed habitual "coping behaviors" to try to get through a stutter. This often involves facial contortions and other body movements. And any onlooker can tell you that adding these coping behaviors to stuttering is worse than the stuttering alone. These behaviors are adopted because at some point the person did that thing and they suddenly got through the word or phrase they were stuck on. Whether conscious or unconscious, they keep doing the action in the future in the hopes that it will "save" them. And of course, it doesn't work like a charm.
The other thing we dealt with was helping children who have a tendancy to stutter to minimize the effects. That pretty much involves parents being patient with their child and not in any way "punishing" them for stuttering.
I don't know if this is helpful at all. I also recommend speaking to an actual speech therapist if you want to know more.
Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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