by Malcolm Fraser, Founder, The Stuttering Foundation, USA

Therapy must be practiced full-time to be successful. You must feel that you are on the right track and you must be committed to putting the program into practice. Plan your work well, then work your plan harder than you have ever worked before.

The ideas explained in this book are based on the premise that stuttering can be modified. This means that you can learn to control your difficulty, partly through modifying your feelings and attitudes, and partly through eliminating or correcting the irregular behavior associated with your blocks when you stutter.

This book is written to and for the many adults and teenagers who stutter to describe what you can and should do to control your stuttering. We state confidently that as a stutterer, you do not need to surrender helplessly to your speech difficulty because you can change the way you talk. You can learn to communicate with ease rather than with effort. There is no quick and easy way to tackle stuttering, but with the right approach, self-therapy can be effective.

Experience may have caused you to be skeptical about any plan which claims to offer a solution. You may have tried different treatment ideas and been disappointed and disillusioned in the past. This book promises not quick magical cure and makes no false claims. It describes what you can and should do to build self-confidence and overcome difficulty.

It offers a logical practical program of therapy based on methods and procedures that have been used successfully in many universities and other speech clinics. This approach to therapy has been shown to get results. If there were an easier or better way of learning how to control stuttering, we would recommend it.

We start with two assumptions. One is that you have no physical defect of impairment of your speech mechanism that will get in the way of your achieving more fluent speech. After all, you can probably talk without stuttering when you are alone or not being heard or observed by others. Practically all those who stutter have periods of fluency, and most speak fluently part of the time.

And we assume that you may not be in a position to avail yourself of the services of a speech pathologist, trained to help you work on your problem in the manner described in this book and that, as a result, you need to be your own therapist. Even with competent guidance, authorities would agree that stuttering therapy is to a great extent a do-it-yourself project anyway.

There is no reason for you to spend the rest of your life stuttering helplessly. You can gain confidence in your ability to communicate freely.

Others have prevailed, and so can you.