I approach discourse with a sociolinguist’s curiosity about the communication styles of a particular culture. As autistic rhetorician M. Remi Yergeau (2018) argued, “clinical stories, regardless of their disciplinary home, craft neuroqueer [i.e., neuroatypical] subjects as rhetorically residual subjects” (p. 50). My goal is not to write a clinical description of the apparent deficits in autistic communication. I reject the notion that there is anything inherently bad, wrong, or lacking about autistic communication (especially when neurotypical communication partners so often resist making changes to their own behavior to become better multimodal listeners). I aim to describe what autistic communication is, with as little reference as possible to what it is not. Some have described this as writing from a strengths perspective and advocated for its use by clinicians (Braun et al., 2017). With similar reasoning, I write my research from a strengths perspective. I believe that autistic people and the research literature will derive greater benefit from a perspective that promotes understanding and acceptance over attempts to extinguish idiosyncratic forms of communication.

Original source: Coburn, K.L. (2021). Spoken narratives by autistic adults of under-represented genders.