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From: Steve Hood
Date: 10/8/01
Time: 3:18:39 PM
Remote Name: 199.33.133.50
Hello, Katie
Thank uyou for your interest, and thank you for your comment.
I do not know where you go to school, or which text book you use, but I hope some time is spent in your classes talking about covert-internalized stuttering. It is extremely important.
Fluency is more than the absence of stuttering, and those people who simply define stuttering and the severity of stuttering based upon counts of how frequently it occurs, miss the boat. I hope you also learn that severity involves the duration of how long the suttering moments last, whether they are associated with much effort-tension-struggle, and the types of behaviors: i.e., repeating sounds or syllable, or prolonging sounds, or having hard contacts and silent blocks, etc. These are the overt features, and they are of course important.
But for the folks who are so covert -- it is a different issue: their problem is indeed, very severe, even though there will be little if any stuttering on the surface.
And as Chris was saying in our paper -- sometimes the "coverts" and not readily accepted by the "overts" because they do not give the impression of being severe enough to actually belong to the group.
I hope you, your classmates and your instructor have some thoughtful discussions regarding this important topic.
Maybe you can even get to the NSA Convention next June, and learn even more about all of this.