To Contract or Not To Contract: Hamlet’s True Dilemma.
Hamlet’s mental dilemma, beginning with what must certainly be the most famous written line in all of English literature, “To be or not to be,” is literally one of life or death. He poses his personal agony to himself on the most metaphysical levels. He does not mean, “shall I kill myself?”, nor does he ask himself, “can I live like this?” No, he phrases his quandary, “to be or not to be” indicating that it is existence itself that is open for debate . This same existential deliberation must also be made about the presence of contractions in your writing. Should they exist, or should they not exist . This is the question I will be discussing in this posting.
Arguments can be made either way for the use of contractions in writing. Formalists, such as my fourth grade grammar teacher, state, “Never, ever, ever use contractions in formal writing and never use them when writing anything in my classroom.” The informalists, on the other hand, for whom anything seems to be okay, state,“Is can’t any less clear than cannot? Is wouldn’t any less clear than would not? I don’t think so. In fact, contractions, to me, seem to be an improvement in economy, just as the use of slang, an occasional grammar mistake, or the occasional misspelled word makes my readers more relaxed and comfortable with my writing”. This statement is sponsored by the same individual who would also probably spell the word, “later” as “l8r” on a job application and, then, soon after, wonder why they were not hired for the position. My point of view lies somewhere in between these two extremes.
First of all, I agree with the informalists that, when writing relaxed, low stakes correspondences, anything should be okay when it will be received by a friend, a relative, a coworker, or anyone else who has agreed to the convention, someone who will be accepting of the use of slang or contractions (your BFF vs. your Auntie Harriet, the retired librarian), and someone who is capable of deciphering and understanding the abridged syntax and somewhat encoded message you will be conveying. Contractions are, as I will discuss shortly in this posting, by their very nature, more informal and, when used in speech or writing, seems to put a listener or reader at ease as they seem to convey the instruction, “Relax and put your feet up as we are just having a friendly chat or reading here; there is nothing earth-shaking at stake that we need to concern ourselves about.” Similarly, Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, in her e-zine article, Don’t Use Contractions, states,
“I use contractions to communicate a flowing, easy style. As a writer, I want you, the reader, to feel that I am talking with you and that the words come easily. I do not want to communicate formally with you. (Gaertner-Johnson, 2006). In other words, she is stating here, as I did earlier, that contractions seem to work best where there is an intimacy and a familiarity implied between the writer and the reader.
Conversely, I agree with the formalists that contractions should not be used in formal and important, high stakes writing such as a cover letter for a prospective employer, a college term paper, a company research report, or anything that is written for professional publication. I state this because formal written works are different in nature from their informal counterparts. First of all, in formal writing, more often than not, you will not have an intimacy or a familiarity with your reader.They may want a level of formality because of their status, position, or their academic or professional training. At these times, you do not want to appear to “chummy” as it could be interpreted as a show of disrespect. If a job is on the line, why put it at risk by the use of a misplaced contraction. Secondly, many times, you do not want your reader to be too relaxed or nonchalant because of the nature of the material you are writing; you want your reader being attentive and having their full focus. The use of more formal or technical semantic fields (vocabulary and chosen word set of your writing) and avoiding any conventions of spoken language such as contractions, slang, and idioms helps to create a cognitive context for your reader that prepares them for digesting abstract, intellectually dense material.
I, also, have my own linguistic justifications for not using contractions. As we are all aware, they are used all the time in our spoken language because, go figure, they are a convention of spoken speech. First of all, contractions are faster to produce and more efficient to say- ‘can’t is a one syllable word and “cannot’ is two. Therefore, they become informal shortcuts that we take to help us speed up and to make our communications more proficient. Instead of saying, “Do not go out into the rain,” we shorten it to, “Don’t go out into the rain.” As a result, we save time and energy when we speak, and, as a result of taking these shortcuts repeatedly, multiply the total amount of information we will be able to verbally convey to others over our lifetimes.
Because of the speech apparatus humans are born with, the teeth, throat, vocal cords, lips, palate, glottus, velum,(Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2006) and how we produce sounds, stops- obstructing the air stream completely, fricatives- partially obstructing the air stream with friction, affricatives- stopping the air stream completely, and then releasing it, liquids- partial obstruction the air stream with no friction, glides- little or no obstruction of the air stream, but must occur with a vowel (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2006), certain vowel and consonant combinations are easier to produce, pronounce, and to speak rapidly than others are. Therefore, we end up having to resort to playing linguistic gymnastics with our speech production mechanisms to make harder to pronounce combinations easier to produce and more efficient.
Two of these techniques I will be discussing in support of my argument are: syncope, which is the loss of one or more unstressed vowel sounds from the interior of a word (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2006), (Contributors, 2009) and lenition, which is the change in the sound produced by a spoken consonant from a stronger form to one that is considered weaker (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2006), (Contributors, 2009). Without getting further involved in a lengthy discussion of linguistics, which is beyond the scope of this posting, let it suffice to say that when we speak the words, “cannot” or “did not”, the vowel sound of the short “o” in “not” is unstressed, so, over time the it eventually fades away in usage, and “cannot” and “did not” end up being pronounced as “cannt’ or “did nt” , graphically represented, right or wrong, as our contractions, “can’t” and “didn’t”. Similarly, when we pronounce the word, “later”, due to the interaction of the vowel-consonant-vowel, through the process of lenition, we alter the unvoiced stop sound of “t” to the voiced stop sound of “d” to make the combination of elements easier to pronounce due to the mechanics of our speech apparatus. This means that rather than correctly saying, “later”, which requires more energy to produce and is less efficient, we say “lader”. Getting back to my original argument, due to the fact that we do not encounter the same linguistic mechanics when we read , I submit that since we do not spell the word, “later” as “lader” when we write, even though we pronounce it that way, why then, should writing “can’t” or “didn’t” be acceptable except under the most informal of situations or when you are actually trying to represent spoken speech such as when writing dialog in a fictional narrative.
My final justification for not using contractions is that it helps to prevent a common mistake many writers make, which is confusing “its,” the possessive of “it” and “it’s,” the contraction of “it is”. The same mistake is also made in distinguishing between “there’, the adverb meaning “that location,” “their,” the possessive of” “they,” and “they’re,” the contraction of “they are.” When these words are confused and used incorrectly, it really is considered quite a flagrant mistake and can really make a person look ignorant, illiterate, or, at the very least, careless in the eyes of your supervisor, a customer, a supplier, a group you are associated with, an instructor, or any other knowledgeable or educated person. A very easy way to reduce the chance you will confuse these words is to eliminate the contraction option. If you get in the habit of writing “it is” and “they are” all the time, you are left with only “its,” the possessive of “it”- eliminating the confusion problem and making an easily distinguishable choice between, “there,” the adverb, and “their,” the possessive of “they.” The simpler you keep things, the less likely you are to make mistakes of this nature.
So, this posting has discussed the conditions under which contractions are acceptable to be used in your writing. Additionally, I have discussed my reasoning and justification for not using them as well. In Hamlet’s terms, we have debated his same existential dilemma and determined that only under a very narrow set of conditions are contractions acceptable “To Be Contracted”. For the remaining bulk of your writings, contractions, in my argued and supported opinion, are ‘Not to be Contracted”.
Contributors, N. A. (2009, December 23). Syncope (Phonetics). Retrieved January 21, 2010, from Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncope_(phonetics)
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2006). An Introduction to Language (6th ed.). London, England: Heinle.
Gaertner-Johnson, L. (2006, April 18). Don’t Use Contractions? Retrieved January 20, 2010, from Business Writing: Talk, Tips, and Best Picks From the Job: http://www.businesswritingblog.com/business_writing/2006/04/dont_use_contra.htm
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