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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 21 Oct 2005
Time: 09:51:43 -0500
Remote Name: 66.10.108.34
Hi Jamie. Thanks very much for the compliment on the article and your question. I think this question gives further opportunity to explain how cluttering is different than many speech disorders. I think that with cluttering, it is almost impossible to break cluttering into speech tasks, like you can with other disorders. Something that you've probably heard is how cluttering is described as "effortless disfluencies." This means that there really are no difficult speech tasks and that the cluttered speech is a symptom and not the problem. You bring up an interesting question about the reaction of others. The most common reaction to my cluttering is what I call "the face." I want you to picture when you're explaining something technical to a non-technical person, and they look at you like they didn't understand anything that you said. That's "the face." I think the difference with a clutterer is that they have no tools at their disposal to get any reaction besides "the face." With you in the example above, you can just tone down the technical language or give a simple analogy, or if worse comes to worse, just switch to a non-technical subject. With a clutterer, no matter what they try, they are always going to get "the face." At least that's how it seemed to me. Another dynamic that happened when I was younger was that I was unable to verbally defend myself. This is probably especially hard in grade school. I'm guessing that this is similar with people with other speech disorders, but probably the difference with a clutterer is that the clutterer wouldn't have the same level of awareness of what was happening and why. Thanks, Joseph