• 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 lose movements of the lips and jaw. Feel the words as you say them.

• Eliminate all avoidance of word substitution, habits which 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 you fear.

• Maintain natural eye contact with your listener.

• Occasionally stutter on purpose! By blocking or repeating intentionally, you begin to feel how to control your speech mechanism during those tense moments.

• Monitor and identify what you are doing unnecessarily when you stutter. The more you can self-analyze your stuttering, the more aware you become of how to modify the muscle coordination 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 about the block. Try to focus on how to resume fluency.

• 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 tension for 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. Don’t dwell upon your failures; celebrate those moments when you succeed in speaking more fluently.

Courtesy: MALCOLM FRASER, Founder, The Stuttering Foundation