Send the Leader a ‘Case Puzzler’ for Its Award-Winning Column

It didn’t take much for speech-language pathologist Ken Anderson to sell The ASHA Leader editorial staff on his idea for a “Case Puzzler” column in the Leader. The case involved a student on his caseload who’d received a mistaken diagnosis of autism when the real issue was anxiety. We on the Leader staff had heard about cases of autism/anxiety confusion before, some of us even experiencing it with our own children. We asked Ken, an SLP at Walt Whitman High School in Long Island, how quickly he could get the column to us. And its content didn’t resonate with just us: It hit a chord with Leader readers—garnering 8,201 pageviews on the Web—and, most recently, it wowed a panel of Association Media and Publishing judges. The column Ken wrote won a gold EXCEL Award (AMP’s most prestigious award level) last week during the AMP Annual Meeting outside Washington, D.C. The EXCEL Awards recognize excellence and leadership in nonprofit association media, publishing, marketing and communications. Also winning (silver) EXCEL Awards this year were ASHA’s “Value of the CCCs” promotional campaign and the ASHA Marketing Solutions website. At last year’s EXCEL Awards, the same Leader column, “Case Puzzler” (by a different author—Nicole Archambault Besson) won a bronze EXCEL Award. Nicole is a private practitioner in the Los Angeles area. Whereas Ken’s column chronicled the case of an 11-year-old whose autism diagnosis seemed way off, Nicole’s column traced how ...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Audiology Speech-Language Pathology challenging cases diagnosis Speech Disorders Source Type: blogs