When You Should Use (and Avoid) Contractions

Some years ago I wrote a book called “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.” In it I tried to get at some of the elements — other than content — that make strong writers’ prose distinctive and immediately identifiable: their stylistic fingerprint. To illustrate the general concept, I used the example of contractions. Consider two sentences: “I do not like green eggs and ham.” And “I don’t like green eggs and ham.” The meaning (obviously) is identical. But the sound, the voice, is quite different.

Most of us aren’t a Hemingway, or a Samuel Beckett, or a Dr. Seuss, and we shoot for a more or less transparent style — one that (as they say of good baseball umpires) is not noticed. And that extends to the use of contractions.

Of course, transparency means different things for different sorts of writing. In the depiction of speech, such as dialogue in fiction and scripts or quotations in journalism, readers expect a contraction to be used pretty much every time it’s an option because that is the way people talk. When I taught journalism, students would occasionally turn in an article with a line like, “‘I did not expect that to happen,’ Smith said.” I would comment: “Either Smith really said ‘didn’t’ or he speaks in an oddly stilted manner, in which case you should slip in a line such as, ‘Smith speaks like a character in a Damon Runyon story.’” 

Song lyrics also need to be conversational; consider the titles of classic American popular songs like “I Won’t Dance,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.”

Damon Runyon, whom I mentioned a few sentences back, was an early 20th-century New York writer whose stories were the basis of the classic musical “Guys and Dolls.” The hallmarks of his nontransparent style was that the gangsters and other Broadway denizens who narrated and peopled his stories, (A) embraced the present tense and (B) eschewed contractions, as if they were in a Dr. Seuss book. The first sentence of the collection "Damon Runyon Omnibus" contains the line, “ordinarily I do not care for any part of lawyers.” The phrase “do not” appears more than 30 times in just the first two stories; the word “don...

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