How do you spell a stutter?

I've done it the second way and that's the way it was published, with the ...

Hyphens are for quick, sudden breaks. "..." is for short pauses. Depends how you imagine it sounding in your head.

I always do the ... as well. It is also better for rhythm than the hyphens (you need to pause a little on the .... but hyphens can be skipped over rather quickly, giving little to no pause)

I use the em dash to show someone getting interrupted. ( - )
I would use ellipses to show a stutter (...)

I've seen the dash to show a stutter. Like said previously it depends on how you hear it in your head.

If it breaks in the middle of a word, I use an emdash. If it's a pause between words, an ellipsis.

Hootie821 said:

How do you spell out words that a person who has had a stroke would speak...you know ....with kind of a stutter and very slow and deliberate?

Say the person is trying to say "Thanks for coming to see me"....do you use dashes like "Thanks for com-com-ing to see me"? Or do you use periods like "Thanks for com..com..ing to see me"?

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Try

"Thanks for c-c-coming to see me."

Or at least that's the way I've most commonly seen it done.

However, keep it to a minimum. It can get really tedious to read.

I would do it as BethS suggests, for the most part, but I think it's largely a matter of personal preference and, as was mentioned, how you hear it in your own head. Also (like BethS says), use it minimally, for effect. If the character is going to be speaking a lot, you can just mention up-front that everything he says is stuttered, and that obviates the need to put it in explicitly everywhere.

Whatever solution you come to will depend on the story you're writing. You don't want to slow the book to a crawl in search of absolute verisimilitude every time your stutterer makes an appearance, just give a flavour of their speech patterns.

Next bit isn't so much about spelling a stutter as writing one:


I stutter. Fortunately for me, years of speech therapy as a child mostly dealt with my speech impediments so I can now stand up in front of a class of students and be no more incomprehensible than your average academic. I do still stutter but can control it (mostly) by avoiding words containing trigger sounds. I cannot say words like fritillary (fortunately, I don't need to say fritillary very often - though every so often the dratted things come my way) but that's just an example; anything with ls and rs in quick succession throws me. Sometimes of course - when reading aloud - one can't change words and there I just have to run at them and hope. Other languages are another problem: I've been revisiting my Latin lately and it has revealed my stammer in all its glory because I can't substitute there as I can in English.


If your character has been living with this stutter for any length of time s/he may well have learnt or been taught ways of controlling it. This may come out with slightly convoluted word choices (I'll describe a fritillary rather than attempt to say the word, for example) or brief pauses as one seaches frantically for word/s with a similar meaning but different sounds.


If your character recently acquired a stutter due to stroke or some other head injury then I'd suggest on first introduction showing the attempts to get past a word and/or a listener trying hard to understand or (worse) inserting for him/herself the word the speaker has stuck on. That doesn't make it any easier to go on with the sentence. After that, just refer to the existence of the stutter and the difficulty in comprehension.

One thing you might try doing is finding a video clip of someone with a stutter, and try to write a precise transcript of what they're saying. Some time back I wanted to write a character who basically aped the speaking style of Jimmy Stewart, so I found a bunch of clips from Stewart films (mostly Harvey, because Elwood P. Dowd is the best thing) and transcribed them word-for-word, including every pause and stutter, where commas and periods and ellipses seemed to fall. After awhile, writing dialogue like that came pretty easily.

Just an idea.

I'd do a stutter just like one does an accent - just enough so we know it's there, using tell more often than show. Dialogue doesn't have to be an exact replication of actual speech.

kuwisdelu said:

If it breaks in the middle of a word, I use an emdash. If it's a pause between words, an ellipsis.

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Yep. That's what I do, too.

For me, the best way to handle this kind of situation (or foreign accents, dialects, etc.) is simply to write, "He spoke with a stutter" and let the reader fill in the blanks. Then maybe once in a while you can remind the reader by having him stall out on a particular word or having another character remark oe reflect on his speech pattern I it's a lot easier on the reader this way.

A stroke victim's stutter may not be like a stutterer's stutter. Stuttering is a specific neurological problem. Stroke victims most often either slur their words or pause while trying to form them because they're re-training muscles.

I can see a stutterer saying, "Thanks for c-coming to see me." But a stroke victim might sound more like this: "Thanks ...for ...coming." Yes, it can be tiresome to read, but then, it can also be tiresome to listen to a stroke victim.

You might want to talk to someone who deals with stroke victims to find out how they actually talk.

Hootie821 said:

How do you spell out words that a person who has had a stroke would speak...you know ....with kind of a stutter and very slow and deliberate?

Say the person is trying to say "Thanks for coming to see me"....do you use dashes like "Thanks for com-com-ing to see me"? Or do you use periods like "Thanks for com..com..ing to see me"?

Click to expand...

I do it phonetically: "Thanks for cuh-coming to suh-huh-hee me."

I'm more of a fan of dashes, personally. I find any other punctuation makes my brain pause for longer than it should.

Phonetics like that are ill-advised, unclear and can become very irritating.

If a reader knows a character has had a stroke or stutters and speaks with difficulty the reader will interpret that character's dialogue accordingly with only a very occasional reminder - give readers credit for remembering what they read. How others react to a character having difficulty in expressing himself is another means of conveying slurred or difficult speech without using phonetics.

In addition, if some of your readers do suffer from a speech impediment do you think they want to read it in phonetics all the time?

Gynn said:

I do it phonetically: "Thanks for cuh-coming to suh-huh-hee me."

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Alessandra Kelley said:

I remember what a revelation it was -- oh yeah, that is more like how people say it -- when his characters said things like "Wuh-what do you muh-mean?" or "thanks for cuh-coming to see me."

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I've always "heard" "W-what do you m-mean" exactly as you've written out? I'm not really sure what the difference is.

If you know what a stutter sounds like, it doesn't matter whether the writer's used perfect phonetics. I agree with Bufty, though, it can get really irritating if every single bit is done phonetically (or pseudo-phonetically).

Hootie821 said:

How do you spell out words that a person who has had a stroke would speak...you know ....with kind of a stutter and very slow and deliberate?

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There are diff'rent strokes for different folks. The effects can be quite individual, depending on the person and the location and severity.

In general, for what you're thinking, ellipses work fine. You can overdo them at first, but don't keep it up at the same intensity. If it's too fatiguing for a reader to follow, they won't.

You can also, after a few lines of difficult conversation, finish up with a summary of what what said.

EG, 'When I left the hospital, I had gotten this much from Jim: his wife was missing, along with his money and bonds, and he'd been attacked outside his garage by a person whose face he recognized, but whose name he could no longer remember.'

Bufty said:

Phonetics like that are ill-advised, unclear and can become very irritating.

If a reader knows a character has had a stroke or stutters and speaks with difficulty the reader will interpret that character's dialogue accordingly with only a very occasional reminder - give readers credit for remembering what they read. How others react to a character having difficulty in expressing himself is another means of conveying slurred or difficult speech without using phonetics.

In addition, if some of your readers do suffer from a speech impediment do you think they want to read it in phonetics all the time?

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To be fair, I've never had a character with a stroke or impediment, so the device is used sparingly.

My latest book features a character who stutters. I used dashes, but I also had him keep silent at times, thinking fluently what he wanted to say but could not.

Treat a stutter like dialect: Use it very sparingly.