After 100+ autism interviews, it’s time to debrief

I’m finally coming up for air after an intensive autism project funded by National Science Foundation. We had seven weeks to conduct at least 100 interviews–mostly with parents of autistic kids and with autism-focused teachers and therapists. The unrelenting stress of those seven weeks (which also involved weekly homework, lectures, and presentations, two trips to Boston, and a boot-camp ethos throughout) reminded me of the unrelenting stress I felt during the most difficult eras of J’s childhood.

And the difficulty I found in tracking down autism parents made me wonder whether autism is quite the epidemic people say it is.

My specific target was parents of children somewhere in the middle of the autism spectrum: kids who can recognize and produce at least a few spoken and written words, but who continue to struggle at least to some extent in putting those words together into grammatical phrases and sentences.

In the end, I spoke with about 40 parents, just barely enough to meet our weekly quotas and not get yelled at. Actually, the fear of being yelled at—funny how that doesn’t fade away with age!—was ultimately a good thing, as it resulted in some really interesting interviews.

Here are my main takeaways (some of these will be familiar to anyone familiar with autism):

On pause

On Twitter today, a page on colons & semicolons as pause indicators:

I have spent a great many hours trying unteach this misconception. Very unhelpful. https://t.co/8JIefQZ4MW

— David Didau (@DavidDidau) July 6, 2019

I don’t know why you’d teach colons and semicolons as pause indicators, let alone why you’d represent punctuation signs as musical notation. To teach punctuation, teach the clause. 

That said, writers can and do use punctuation marks to create a pause when they want one:

From Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves