Why are People Afraid of Contractions?

And by ‘contractions,’ I mean the contraction of “is not” to “isn’t,” “I have” to “I’ve” and so on. Not the ‘contraction’ you get in pregnancy. I feel sick just thinking about that…

You use contractions every day. When you talk to someone, you don’t say: “It is a lovely day.” So why is it that when it comes to putting pens on paper, fingers on keyboards, hipster hands on typewriters, flailing arms on tablets: contractions are the first thing to go?

The Matrix Sequels are excellent…in that they’re a great lecture in how not to write a screenplay, story, or anything in general – up there with the Star Wars Prequels and The Room. Almost every line of dialogue feels like it’s been written in another language, and this is almost entirely down to fear of contractions. From Morpheus spouting overlong speeches saying things like “I believe it is our destiny. We shall find what it is.” to simple lines like “let us move now” or “it is not possible.”

The use of “it is” and “you are” should only really be applied when a sentence is having every syllable emphasised – something which a character will probably only do once throughout the entire story. Just think about how many times someone actually looks right into your eyes and says something like “it will be done” in real conversation. Unless you live with aliens, this is probably extremely rare.

I would say that contractions should be avoided when you want to emphasise anything in general, but “it’s a death camp” still sounds much better than “it is a death camp.” The latter is just an added syllable that gets stuck in the back of your throat when read. Unless your writing dialogue for The G-Man

Failure to use contractions means you either haven’t read your work aloud to check it flows and rolls nicely off the tongue. That or you just haven’t listened enough to how people talk. The Matrix movies are the latter, since it’s a screenplay performed by actors – meaning that of course people have read through it…but they just don’t understand how people talk. They also don’t understand how people behave either, but that’s another blog post.

I think the reason why people don’t use contractions is because they’ve been taught in English class that contractions are too informal. And yes, they are – but you’re not writing a formal essay. You’re writing a story. You’re writing people talking. It’s just like how people are told they can’t begin a sentence with ‘and.’ Well; I just did that four sentences ago and you probably didn’t even notice. Take that, Mr Barden!

George Orwell’s last and most important rule of writing is to break every rule if necessary, and it appears that if you want to create a discourse that sounds genuine then you have no choice but to break all the rules. So go break them! You’re a writer now. Tear up the dictionary! Write something that you would be afraid to show to your parents. If you can’t imagine your English teacher writing big red crosses all over your story then you’re doing something wrong.