Below is a short essay in which Charles Lamb, (b. 1776, d. 1835), himself a person who stutters, describes stuttering quite vividly.
Popular Fallacy VII: Of Two Disputants the Warmest Is Generally in the Wrong
by Charles Lamb
Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. Temper,
indeed, is no test of truth; but warmth and earnestness are a proof at
least of a man's own conviction of the rectitude of that which he
maintains. Coolness is as often the result of an unprincipled indifference
to truth or falsehood, as of a sober confidence in a man's own side in a
dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the appearance of this
philosophic temper. There is little Titubus, the stammering law-stationer
in Lincoln's Inn -- we have seldom known this shrewd little fellow engaged
in an argument where we were not convinced he had the best of it, if his
tongue would but fairly have seconded him. When he has been spluttering
excellent broken sense for an hour together, writhing and labouring to be
delivered of the point of the dispute -- the very gist of the controversy
knocking at his teeth, which like some obstinate iron-grating still
obstructed its deliverance -- his puny frame convulsed, and face reddening
all over at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to
expose, it has moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an
adversary, that cared not a button for the merits of the question by merely
laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him to be
*calm* (your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a provoking
sneer carry the argument clean away from him in the opinion of all the
bystanders, who have gone away clearly convinced that Titubus must have
been in the wrong, because he was in a passion; and that Mr --, meaning his
opponent, is one of the fairest and at the same time one of the most
dispassionate arguers breathing.
added March 15, 1998