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From: Bob Quesal
Date: 10/7/02
Time: 9:10:00 AM
Remote Name: 143.43.201.67
Good question, Sue! I used to think that these pseudostuttering exercises were a waste of time - you can get the same effect going out in public with your pants unzipped or your blouse unbuttoned. The person who does not stutter will have the advantage of only having to do this once, and after that will go back to being normally fluent.
But some of my colleagues convinced me that this was a good exercise, so I incorporated it into my class. What is most amazing to me is that the students go through the same kind of avoidance and postponement that many stutterers so. For example, a few years ago my wife ran into a couple of my students at the local Wal-Mart. They were there to do their pseudostuttering exercise, but were walking all over the store because they were looking for the "right" sales clerk to talk to. I think this kind of exercise helps the students to see that the things many of our clients who stutter do are very normal reactions to the fear of fluency breakdown or the repeated experience of fluency breakdown.
Yes, what is experienced in a pseudostuttering exercise is different from what a stutterer experiences, but at least it is an attempt to understand.
The anger in my ISAD essay was directed toward those who do not seem to want to make the effort to understand that there is more to stuttering than fluency and then dismiss those "extra-fluency" factors as unimportant.
I hope this clarifies things.
Bob Q.