[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Russ Hicks
Date: 04 Oct 2007
Time: 12:18:47 -0500
Remote Name: 71.123.180.215
Howdy from Texas Michael and Katie! Great paper! I love to read all the papers in this conference. One thing in your paper that really stood out - for it's almost total absence! - was the word "fluency." I did a "find text" on my browser and found only two instances of that word in your entire paper! One was in Katie's bio which said "...Specialty Board of Fluency Disorders" and the other one was in your text under the Benefits which said "The definition of success shifts away from fluency, to something more important". Hooray!!! You got it!!!! ..... So many people in the stuttering community - and a lot of them are stutterers themselves - place WAAAY too much emphasis on fluency. What you are doing is precisely what needs to be done. Start with the easy EMOTIONAL stuff and SLOWLY work up to the hard stuff. Right on! As the stuttering iceberg clearly shows, emotions play a far greater role in stuttering than simple fluency. (See my 2003 ISAD paper called 'The Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering' at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for more details of this.) ..... Do you have any statistics on the success of this approach? I'm sure it works, but in the "evidence based therapy" environment we're in, it would be nice to have some hard statistics to show to people to say "See? This works!!!" ..... Keep up the good work! And come down to see us in WARM Texas! Go Cowboys! ..... Russ