Jonty Claypole is Director of BBC Arts, Chairman of the arts centre HOME in Manchester, and is named in The Bookseller 150, a list of the most influential people in publishing.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/69414164-de08-4590-8e39-4b6b37e761a6_Jonty+Claypole.jpg?auto=compress,format

Jonty Claypole

Author

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/3326b1cd-576d-4546-9d02-8c480266b4f4_Words+Fail+Us+book+cover.jpg?auto=format,compress

In Defence of Disfluency

Words Fail Us

One of those rare books I hadn’t realised I’d been waiting for until I read it

Open-minded, thoughtful and wise… A liberating book

In an age of polished TED Talks and overconfident political oratory, success seems to depend upon charismatic public speaking. But what if hyper-fluency is not only unachievable but undesirable?

Jonty Claypole spent 15 years of his life in and out of extreme speech therapy. From sessions with child psychologists to lengthy stuttering boot camps and exposure therapies, he tried everything until finally being told the words he’d always feared: “We can’t cure your stutter.” Those words started him on a journey towards not only making peace with his stammer but learning to use it to his advantage.

Here Jonty argues that our obsession with fluency could be hindering, rather than helping, our creativity, authenticity and persuasiveness. Exploring other speech conditions, such as aphasia and Tourette’s, and telling the stories of the “creatively disfluent” – from Lewis Carroll to Kendrick Lamar – Jonty explains why it’s time for us to stop making sense, get tongue-tied and embrace the life-changing power of inarticulacy.

story

Galleries and Reading Room

Library

Shop

Café

We’re undertaking some research with website visitors to learn more about how people find access-related information provided by museums. This survey shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes to complete. Thank you for your time!