These rate abnormalities further are manifest in one or more of the following symptoms: (a) an excessive number of disfluencies, the majority of which are not typical of people with stuttering; (b) the frequent placement of pauses and use of prosodic patterns that do not conform to syntactic and semantic constraints; and (c) inappropriate (usually excessive) degrees of coarticulation among sounds, especially in multisyllabic words.
[5] Clutterers often have reading and writing disabilities, especially sprawling, disorderly handwriting, which poorly integrate ideas and space.
[7] The common goals of treatment for cluttering include slowing the rate of speech, heightening monitoring, using clear articulation, using acceptable and organized language, interacting with listeners, speaking naturally, and reducing excessive disfluencies.
It is important that speech language pathologists do not nag their clients to "slow down" incessantly, as this does not help and can actually hinder progress.
Additionally, video and audio recordings may be used to show those who clutter where communication starts to break down in their speech.
These articulation treatment strategies include practicing short sentences with "over-articulated", unnatural but technically correct, speech.
This can be aided by learning how to begin narratives with simple, short sentences, and slowly building to longer, more complex ones.
Additionally, clinicians may transcribe cluttered speech to clients to show them run-ons and ramblings, and then ask them to just state the necessary, most important information in the utterance.
[12] Weiss claimed that Battaros, Demosthenes, Pericles, Justinian, Otto von Bismarck, and Winston Churchill were clutterers.