Monday, September 12, 2016

Stuttering in advertising



Joe Gill writes to me:
Growing up with a stammer and studying to go into the Graphic Design industry I found that nearly all advertising aimed towards stammering was either very condescending or just outright bad design. I tried to tackle this with a design of a poster advertising campaign for 'The Starfish Project'.
What's your opinion? I really like the texts as they get to the heart of what it is like to be a person who stutters.

Here is an article on his work.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

The new treatment approach: Stutter Pride

Here is what I recently read in a document need for damage control resulting from strong debates between various teams (fluency shapists, stuttering modifiers, and "stutter pride" proponents).

Until recently, we had two approaches: fluency shaping (learn how to speak in a new and more fluent way) and stuttering modification (learn how to modify your stuttering for the better).

Now, we have in analogy to Gay Pride, Stutter Pride. You say: it's OK that I stutter, actually it is not only OK, it's great because it makes me special and we should tell the world that we are proud to be stutterers. The approach is clear: define-away the problem. Just declare that there is no problem, or at the very least that this difference to the norm is no issue at all and it's society and the affected person brainwashed by society to set those norms. And in a second step, unleash political correctness on your enemies, because everyone who declares that fluent speech is the norm and that they do not like to listen to people who stutter, are stutter-phobes (in analogy to homophobes) is an enemy