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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 08 Oct 2005
Time: 13:56:46 -0500
Remote Name: 24.10.194.97
The term originates from an SLP trying to understand what the cluttering client is saying, as the cluttering client goes around and around, from subject to subject, "as if lost in a maze." So kind of like the clutterer is lost in a maze of thoughts and that they can't get out. ASHA defines mazing as "rambling, run-on verbalizations that add nothing to the content of the message." My speech sample with this article is a good example of mazing, if you take away all of the disfluencies...the speech kind of goes around in circles, and it seems like I have a point, but that I'm lost and can't really find it. To me, when I'm mazing, it seems a lot more like "webbing" than mazing, because each point seems connected in a loose way to other points, and so I can go from one point to another in the spider web, and then back again. I've found that the "solution" to mazing is to concentrate on having one and only one point and focusing all of my energies when I'm speaking on having everything relate back to the main point. That seems to be a skill that most people have that I didn't have at all before I started working on improving my cluttering. I was only able to identify mazing after I learned the alternate, of having a main point to what I was saying. And, so then I could say..."I was just mazing when I was talking." And, that's really the only cluttering attribute that I can recognize as doing. Like, I can recognize every disfluency that I make, but they don't seem directly connected to anything like mazing does. Another example of mazing, that seems very connected to cluttering, is when an older person who has hearing loss, will talk and reminisce about the old days for a long period of time without letting other people speak. I think that one of the things connected with cluttering mazing is that the clutterer is typically unaware of the other person's response in a conversation. The books describe this as "poor turn taking skills" in conversation. I think that having hearing loss kind of simulates this "poor turn taking skills" because it cuts off the feedback loop, so that the conversation becomes one-sided. And, that is very similar to conversations with clutterers, is that they tend to dominate the conversation when they get going. Thanks for the question. Joseph