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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 03 Oct 2007
Time: 15:27:46 -0500
Remote Name: 71.123.180.215
Hey Joe, Thanks for your good words! Actually the more I think about it, I would differentiate "good" and "bad" stuttering with how much struggle is involved. It would be intellectually interesting to plot a X-Y chart with the X-axis being "amount of struggling" and the Y-axis being the "frequency of stuttering." You know me. My X-axis would be very low - a minimum amount of struggling, but my Y-axis would be pretty high - I have LOTS of disfluencies. I call that GOOD stuttering, with very little struggling. .... The diagonally opposite part of that plane is the general domain of the COVERT stutterers who can go for weeks and months with hardly ANY disfluencies, but then they can get hit with a MONSTROUS block coming out of nowhere! (Do you remember Cathy Olish's "n-n-n-n-n-n-natural" block in Boston in 2001? Maaaan... that block nearly killed her! She was an emotional wreck for the rest of the conference!) We call that the "Great White Shark Syndrome" and covert stutterers live in constant dread of the Great White Shark! I get bit my minnows several hundred times a day, but Great White Sharks don't live in my part of the ocean! ..... In your "free time" (ha!), take a look at my Iceberg MATRIX paper I wrote for the 2005 ISAD conference at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad8/papers/hicks8/hicks8.html and tell me what you think. It explores a similar X-Y chart to identify the various types stuttering and includes some possible suggestions for therapy. ..... See ya in Parsippany/NYC! ..... Russ