What a great piece by Ross Coleman about embarking on his speech therapy programme for stammering (My cultural awakening: Jonathan Groff inspired me to overcome my stammer, 6 December). Coleman was inspired by the example of Jonathan Groff, who is not a stammerer, tackling something head-on. The McGuire Programme that Coleman signed up for seems to have helped many people. While Groff served as his inspiration, there are no shortage of actual stammerers who have compelling stories to motivate people as they navigate the choppy waters caused by their speech.
I'm extremely grateful to the team at George's without them, I would have no voice and would have to give up the job I've loved for almost 50 years. They have been amazing, and all the care I've had every step of the way has been second to none. I can't stop singing their praises.
But some clinicians noticed something peculiar: certain patients could remember words quite well but couldn't string them together properly while speaking. In the 1870s, German physician Adolf Kussmaul was among the first to systematically study these sentence-level problems. He identified patients who spoke in halting, telegraphic fragments lacking many connecting words, termed "agrammatism," and others who produced flashes of complex syntax but with a tangled organization, so-called "confused sentence monsters," today's "paragrammatism."