During the initial stages of therapy, I frequently have my students search the internet (www.stutteringhomepage.com) for famous people who stutter. I love the way they react when I tell them there is a six page list of famous people who stutter!

Recently, the excitement of downloading the list turned to confusion for two of my students who stutter. Each of the young men had different interests, so as they sorted through the list, they were looking for different "types" of famous people. For instance, Jason was looking for musicians and sports personalities. Avi was searching for authors and entrepreneurs. They both found the list cumbersome. This led us to a discussion that there were many categories of occupations where the famous people made their impact.

That is when we decided to make a categorizing the list a "speech project." Each of us (me included) chose a few categories and created lists, which I then compiled into an excel spreadsheet. As an indirect benefit of this activity, the boys learned about famous people in a wide variety of occupations. Below are examples of two of the pages we created on the spreadsheet:

Even though we have a completed spreadsheet now, I will continue to have many of my students participate in this activity (from scratch). There is a benefit from the exercise of finding out that there are people who stutter that have pursued their dreams and have made a difference in the world.

You can post Questions/comments about the above paper to the author before October 22, 2007.