Ben Yagoda Crunches the 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 — dialogue in fiction and scripts, quotations in journalism — readers expect a contraction to be used pretty much every time it’s an option, as 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 stiltedly, in which case you should note it.”

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.”

The hallmarks of Damon Runyon’s 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‘t does not occur at all in the collection, which consists of three complete books.

Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit, is narrated by on old woman, Mattie Ross, remembering in the 1920s her adventures many years earlier. Both Mattie and the people she quotes usually avoid contractions. For example:

She must have seen the dismay on my face for she added, “It will be all right. Grandma Turner will not mind. She is used to doubling up. She will not even know you are there, sweet.”

The characters in the Coen brothers’ 2010 movie version of the novel generally don’t use contractions, either. Ethan Coen said in an interview, “We’ve been told that the language and all that formality is faithful to how people talked in the period.” As Mark Liberman demonstrated on Language Log, the Coens were told wrong. Liberman searched Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876) and found  “58 instances of won’t, and just one of will not — in the author’s preface. … There are 223 instances of don’t, against just one instance of do not.”

Contractions are also the default in emails and other informal, conversational writing. In prose that’s directed at a general audience, the expectation is that they will be used judiciously. In On Writing Well, William Zinsser counseled, “ … trust your ear and your instincts. … Your style will be warmer and truer to your personality if you use contractions like ‘I’ll’ and ‘won’t’ and ‘can’t’ when they fit comfortably into what you’re [I see what you did there, Mr. Zinsser] writing.”

Even following that advice, there is a lot of room for leeway. I crunched some numbers for two books I have on my Kindle: Unbroken, by the outstanding popular historian and journalist Laura Hillenbrand, and These Truths, by Jill Lepore. I came up with these results, on the percentage of times each writer used, and didn’t use, common contractions:

 

 was notwasn’tdid notdidn’the hadhe’dThese Truths 574362383179Unbroken20806945941

 

It’s not surprising that Hillenbrand should generally use more contractions than Lepore, a Harvard historian writing for a general audience. The striking — nontransparent — thing is Lepore’s very soft spot for the past-perfect contraction he’d.  She uses it 269 times, including in two successive sentences: “But Columbus himself did not consider the lands he’d visited to be a new world. He thought only that he’d found a new route to the old world.”

Contractions are frequently, usually, or almost always absent in four types of prose. A post on the American Psychological Association’s style blog instructs, “avoid contractions in scholarly writing.” Exceptions are direct quotes or when “making an off-the-cuff or informal remark within an otherwise formal paper.” The Modern Language Association’s style site, by contrast, says, “The MLA allows contractions in its publications. In professional scholarly writing, sometimes a formal tone is desired, but often a more conversational approach is taken.”

You will generally also not find contractions in formal business writing — especially, as Erin Wright points out on her blog, in “instructions that can impact safety and security: ‘Do not heat this metal container in the microwave.’ (Instead of ‘Don’t heat this … ‘) ‘Passengers cannot leave their seats until the ride comes to a complete stop.’ (Instead of ‘Passengers can’t leave … ‘)”

In legal writing,  a number of judges use contractions in rulings, but the general sense is that they should be avoided in briefs. On the Lawyerist blog, Matthew Salzwedel quotes the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia as calling contractions “marketplace” vulgarisms and warning lawyers that judges might view them as “an affront to the dignity of the court. …  And those judges who don’t take offense will not understand your brief, or vote for your case, one whit more readily.” (Salzwedel notes,”Perhaps only Justice Scalia can get away with using a contraction — don’t — when instructing lawyers not to use contractions such as don’t.“)

The fourth contraction-free zone might be surprising. It’s newspaper journalism, especially as practiced in The New York Times. The Times style guide instructs, “In straightforward news copy, spell out expressions like is not, has not, have not, do not, are not, will not, etc.” And sure enough, the lead story on the paper’s website as I write, “Manafort Breached Deal by Repeatedly Lying, Mueller Says,” sidesteps contractions 16 times, for example in the sentence, “The filing Monday suggested that prosecutors do not consider Mr. Manafort a credible witness.” (Emphasis added.) The only contractions that appear are in quotations.

I see that in this post, I have chosen contractions eight times and avoided them seven. How’s that for transparency?