| SPEAK EASY inc. - Canada's Organization For People Who Stutter - presents: |
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| GUIDELINES FOR GREATER FLUENCY |
| Always try to: |
| * Speak more slowly and in a deliberate manner. Draw out the vowels and do not skip over syllables. It won't sound as slow as you think! |
| * Slide into words with light and loose movements of the lips and jaw. Feel and taste the words as you say them. |
| * Eliminate all avoidance or word substitutions, habits that you may use to postpone or eliminate stuttering. Feared words only become a larger problem when you attempt to run away from them. |
| * Keep moving forward in your speech. Repeating words you have already said only postpones the attempt to say the next word that you fear. |
| * Maintain natural eye contact with the listener. |
| * Occasionally stutter on purpose! By blocking and/or repeating intentionally, you begin to feel how to control your speech mechanism during those tense moments. |
| * Monitor and identify what you do unnecessarily when you stutter. The more you can self-analyze your stuttering, the more aware you become of how to modify the muscle co-ordination needed to produce more fluent speech. Stuttering does not "just happen." |
| * Remember that your goal is to be more fluent -- not perfect! Even normal speakers have disfluencies in their conversational speech. |
| * Perhaps you cannot control your stuttering all the time, but you can control what you do after a block. Try to focus on how to resume fluency. |
| * Feel a responsibility for your own behavior and for carrying out the changes that need to be made. |
| * Be willing, temporarily, to place greater emphasis upon how you talk and how you feel than upon what you have to say. |
| * Tell your listeners that you stutter. By not pretending you are a normal speaker -- and by actually confronting and discussing what you are trying to hide -- the fear will lessen and fluency will come more easily. |
| * Prevent anxiety or tenson from overwhelming your fluent speech. Stuttering is nothing to be ashamed about and you certainly don't do it on purpose. Instead of always being embarrassed by a block, analyze what you did, try to say the word again fluently, and then move on. |
| * Become willing to enter difficult situations even though you expect to stutter. |
| * Develop an emotional acceptance of your stuttering as a problem capable of control. |
| * Don't dwell upon your failures; celebrate those moments when you succeed in communicating more effectively. At day's end, remember your success and forget your failures. |
| * Strive to learn as much about stutteriing as you can and your own problem in particular. |