A refinement of the concept "reticence"

This report has 1. Made a distinction between speech disorders involving defects and those that are primarily reticence, but in any case identified speech disorders as negotiated states as opposed to fixed disease states. 2. Argued that there is a clear analytical separation between speech disorders and speech behaviors which are indicative of neurotic disorders. 3. Attempted to remove anxiety as a component of the communication process by according it its rightful place, which is central in human personality. Furthermore, we have attempted to dispel the notion that anxiety is evil and the perennial (and sole) cause of speech disorders. 4. Identified a specialist known as the rhetoritherapist (a specially trained speech teacher) as the particular king of professional qualified to deal with speech disorders (in conjuction with speech pathologists and/or psychotherapists where necessary). We have accorded to the rhetoritherapist the province of instruction and training in all aspects of invention, delivery, and reception of rhetorical speech without reference to its moral intent. 5. Identified "reticence" as the most useful of the various imprecise terms used to refer to people with speech problems, because it is devoid of connotations that go beyond the speech process. Further refinement of specific categories of speech disorders is necessary to order to expand the repertoire of available treatment strategies. Such refinement will probably include reference to the various subprocesses of human speech identified earlier in this paper as they are related to the rhetorical situation. The rhetoritherapist thus emerges as the trouble-shooter, but not the "psychotherapist," of speech pedagogy.