Folks with social anxiety/fear of public speaking (both are actual disorders) also stutter but it’s different, they only stutter with certain people and/or in particular situations and there’s actually a science to it, too, and it’s slightly similar to stuttering as a speech disorder but instead of permanent reduced blood flow in the Broca’a area, it’s temporary signals being sent to that area that alters the blood flow and hence induce a stutter - I have done my research on this before and I urge you to look that up. In this case, stuttering is a direct cause of nervousness and that’s it. Using ‘stuttering/stutter’ to describe nervous speech causes confusion and I wish the words ‘stuttering/stutter were never used to describe anything other than stuttering, a neurological speech/disfluency disorder, but unfortunately, it already got out of hand and now everyone thinks ‘nervous speech’ and ‘stuttering’ are the same when they are not. However, when it comes to people who stutter (stuttering as a speech disorder), the cause is neurological - they don’t stutter because and only when they are nervous but also anytime, any place, and with anyone. I know that a lot of stutterers, me included, stutter more severely when we are, for instance, presenting publicly or perhaps communicating with someone we deem significant. Here, nervousness is not the cause of the ‘stutter’ but a factor that amplifies the ‘stutter’ and I think the way you describe “we try too hard to speak perfectly and in doing so..” falls under this; it’s because we are anxious, we feel pressured, we are uncomfortable, we don’t want to feel different/less than anyone, so we stutter more than we are supposed to or more than we actually do. That’s why some people who stutter go to speech therapy, some techniques are utilized to reduce stuttering or reduce the feelings/reactions we get in some situations in which we feel we should overthink our speech and hence stutter more severely! I don’t think it’s fair to say “a lot of the people that think they’re stutterers aren’t,” it will be as if we are gatekeeping because we all stutter differently and whether our stutter mildly or severely or occasionally, we are still folks who stutter (I’m not referring to people who stutter due to social anxiety here. That’s a different case). If anything, I think there should be an alternative for the word ‘stuttering’ to describe ‘nervous speech’ as a result of anxiety/stress/fear of public speaking and not a speech disorder. It’s causing so much confusion and unfortunately it’s also trivializing/invalidating the experiences of people who stutter. If I may also ask, where did you get that info that the main reason people can’t get their words out is because they ‘pre-form’ their tongue? I highly doubt that and if I were going to make a long story short, that’s not applicable to stuttering, at least not as a main cause - as I said nervousness amplifies stuttering and let’s not forget that stuttering could also come with secondary behaviors (eyes closing, moving hands/legs, certain mouth/tongue movements). People don’t stutter because they don’t have ‘fluid’ tongues; this isn’t the main cause. To answer your questions, yes I’m a person who stutters and I stutter quite often and unpredictably - I don’t only stutter when I’m giving a presentation but it’s more likely that I’ll stutter/stutter more when I’m presenting. I have a set of words that I find difficult to pronounce. I stutter when I’m talking to my partner, friends, family members, and people I’m most comfortable with. I have fluent moments/day and I also have days where I stutter more often than I usually do with for no apparent reason. Sometimes I stutter when I talk to myself alone in my room and other times I don’t. I don’t understand my stutter and I’m not even trying to understand it but definitely trying my best everyday to accept it and not think less of myself because of it. I do believe we all stutter differently, approach it differently, experience it differently, feel it differently, and react to it differently! Thanks for reading all this.