Handling Difficulties with Speech - Essay Example

This research will begin with the statement that It goes without saying that people, being social creatures, need communication. They need to articulate their ideas and listen to other opinions. It is always frustrating for people to be deprived of the possibility to share their ideas. For instance, modern globalized world presupposes communication among people pertaining to different cultures. Language barriers often become quite a considerable obstacle for such communication. On the other hand, some people have certain speech peculiarity (e.g. stuttering) which makes it more difficult to express their ideas fluently.

Nevertheless, people overcome these speech difficulties in different ways since it is essential for them to share their ideas. It is possible to consider two examples of two individuals’ triumph over speech difficulties. Nowadays many people face the need to communicate with people speaking other languages. The easiest way to overcome this problem is to learn the necessary language. However, the process of learning the language can be much more difficult than it may seem. For instance, David Sedaris when learning French was unlucky to have a really strange teacher who humiliated her students for not knowing something.

Notably, Sedaris did not have any troubles with learning until he attended the first class: before “beginning school, there’d been no shutting” him up, but soon the author “was convinced that everything” he said was “wrong”.. He became confident and started talking. Even though he still made mistakes he started trying and this was the most important. In his essay Sedaris provides a valuable tip for those who are only try to overcome their speech difficulties: talk, make mistakes, but talk, if you have something to say.

Admittedly, as for speech difficulties concerning foreign languages it is possible to state that they are quite easy to deal with. One only has to work hard and master the necessary language. It is much more difficult to overcome such speech difficulties as stuttering. In many cases stutterers are being laughed at, misunderstood and even ignored. Some people do not have patience to wait until a stutterer complete his/her sentence. Edward Hoagland depicts some of unpleasant moments which stutterers often have to live through.

For instance, Hoagland claims that he was often embarrassed to talk because of his stuttering. He used to get nervous and in those cases he stuttered even harder. The writer defines stuttering as something similar to “trying to run with loops of rope around your feet” (Hoagland 158). It is quite difficult, but still possible. Thus, Hoagland states that it is possible to take control of oneself and refine one’s thoughts and words. In fact, stutterers can have a kind of advantage over other people since they learn to control what they say “measuring the importance of anything” they “have to say” (Hoagland 158).

Hoagland continues: “You can stutter till your tongue bleeds and your chest is sore from heaving, but so what, if you haven’t any thing to say that’s worth the humiliation” (160). The writer claims that stutterers should not be embarrassed, instead they