PREFACE

Considerably more than a third of a century has elapsed since I purchased my first book on stammering.  I still have that quaint little book made up in its typically English style with small pages, small type and yellow paper back—­the work of an English author whose obtuse and half-baked theories certainly lent no clarity to the stammerer’s understanding of his trouble.  Since that first purchase my library of books on stammering has grown until it is perhaps the largest individual collection in the world.  I have read these books—­many of them several times, pondered over the obscurities in some, smiled at the absurdities in others and benefited by the truths in a few.  Yet, with all their profound explanations of theories and their verbose defense of hopelessly unscientific methods, the stammerer would be disappointed indeed, should he attempt to find in the entire collection a practical and understandable discussion of his trouble.

This insufficiency of existing books on stammering has encouraged me to bring out the present volume.  It is needed.  I know this—­ because I spent almost twenty years of my life in a well-nigh futile search for the very knowledge herein revealed.  I haunted the libraries, was a familiar figure in book stores and a frequent visitor to the second-hand dealer.  Yet these efforts brought me comparatively little—­not one-tenth the information that this book contains.

Perhaps it is but a colossal conceit that prompts me to offer this volume to those who stutter and stammer as I did.  Yet, I cannot but believe that almost twenty years’ personal experience as a stammerer plus more than twenty-eight years’ experience in curing speech disorders has supplied me with an intensely practical, valuable and worth-while knowledge on which to base this book.

After having stammered for twenty years you have pretty well run the whole gamut of mockery, humiliation and failure.  You understand the stammerer’s feelings, his mental processes and his peculiarities.

And when you add to this more than a quarter of a century, every waking hour of which has been spent in alleviating the stammerer’s difficulty—­and successfully, too—­you have a ground-work of first-hand information that tends toward facts instead of fiction and toward practice instead of theory.

These are my qualifications.

I have spent a life-time in studying stammering, stuttering and kindred speech defects.  I have written this book out of the fullness of that experience—­I might almost say out of my daily work.  I have made no attempt at literary style or rhetorical excellence and while the work may be homely in expression the information it contains is definite and positive—­and what is more important—­it is authoritative.

I hope the reader will find the book useful—­yes, and helpful.  I hope he will find in it the way to Freedom of Speech—­his birthright and the birthright of every man.