When writing, dialogue has a lot of versatility since you don't always have to follow grammatical rules with it. It depends on the character you're writing, but with some, you can give each of them their own habits within their speech and make it unique. It's important to note that you should keep a character's speech consistent unless something happens during their development that changes their speech habits. For example, a character might be pretending to have a certain accent since they're disguising themselves from the rest of the cast, but later on, the character is caught using a completely different voice. The other characters learn that the new voice is the character's actual voice, and the character decides to drop the fake speech patterns.
Another thing to point is stuttering or pauses. Unless the character is known to stutter when talking, the character shouldn't stutter unless they have reason too. In the infectious series, my characters generally only will stutter if they're terrified, nervous or both. Sometimes, it is out of embarrassment too. Just make sure that the stuttering makes sense in the context of the scene you're writing. This works the same with pauses; make sure to explain why the character is pausing/trailing off mid-speech or give enough context of the environment around the character so that the pausing is explained indirectly.
As a last note for this week, contractions (don't, can't, etc.) can exist in dialogue, or they don't have to. Again, it depends on the character's speech patterns. Personally, though, I like to use the non-contracted form of the verb for emphasis. "I do not" versus "I don't" has a stronger impact to it since the phrase has more syllables, and it stresses both "do" and "not." For contractions, I generally use them for more casual conversations or if the character is not trying to emphasize something. Anyway, I hope that this helps!
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