An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Six -- It is time to use contractions

Adverbs was big and scary, and I'm sure adjectives will be too; so let's take a quick breather, and do an easy, short one. In this chapter we're going to look at contractions.

What's a contraction? Well, I just used one, then! They're when you take two words, and you squidge them together into a single word. They tend to have apostrophes in them, because letters get broken off and dropped on the floor when the words are smooshed into each other, and we use apostrophes to indicate what's missing. Your favourite and mine is the word 'it's'. This is, of course, a short form of 'it is' and the 'i' got replaced with an apostrophe when the two words were glued together. (And, as we also all know, 'it's' never ever means 'the thing that belonged to it', because English is awful.)

The line edit technique this time is easy: use contractions whenever possible. Although, as always, I'll talk about when it's cool not to, and not cool to.

First, though, why do we want to use them at all?

Contractions are a natural evolution of the language and have been around for as long as English has. Yes, the Victorian middle classes were horrified by them, but that was an isolated fad. Shakespeare, writing hundreds of years before, uses them all over the place: although, fascinatingly, Elizabethan contractions are different to modern contractions, and it's one of the things that makes old Bill hard to read. They're one of the marks that differentiate the different flavours of English: 'y'all' sounds very US, for example, and that's because the way that they are constructed tends to come from the accent of the speaker. We all use them, endlessly, and we're so used to them that we barely notice them.

They're such a part of the fabric of the language, that they're a great way to shorten your text.

You have, I hope, noticed a theme through this book. Keep it punchy. Keep it quick. Hone every sentence so it's as sharp and balanced as a knife. So, if you can find a way to make your text easier to read, with no cost to meaning or structure, you take it. Contractions are your friend.

This is obvious, right? Why am I saying this?

Maybe it's just me, but I always forget! I think it's because I cut stuff up in the edit process, and then forget to put it back together. I had to scan back loads when I wrote this, and close some 'it is' into 'it's', a 'they are' into a 'they're', and I'm still sure I missed some (in fact I literally just corrected that 'I'm'). So this is probably a late stage scan you can do, to lower your word count and grind your prose.

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But wait! Contractions aren't always good, are they?

No. No, they are not.

There are two big reasons to avoid them, plus some interesting things you can do with them. The first good reason is emphasis.

'I will not get onto that jet-ski.' Janet's nose wrinkled. 'It has not been cleaned for weeks.'

Two candidates for contracting here: 'will not' and 'has not'. I'd contract the second to 'hasn't', and leave the first. Why? Because the emphasis is on the 'not' in Janet's first sentence. You could even imagine italicising that 'not', to show her huge disdain for the dirty jet-ski. I personally wouldn't do that because that's not how I write, but keeping it uncontracted lets her dislike jump out.

Second, you have to be careful with idiomatic contractions. 'Ain't' is a great example of this: it's not a universally used contraction like, say, 'we'll', and so you're using a particular voice in your narrative, and you need to decide if that voice is welcome to your reader.

This, like all the things we've covered, is a choice, not a rule. For example, it could work amazingly if you decide to use idiomatic Victorian contractions, like 'shan't' ('shall not'), 'mayn't' ('may not'), or 'warn't' (were not). You'll make your speaker's or narrator's voice really pop... But the price will be your reader's ease of comprehension. As a result, most writers stay in more idiomatic contractions, and live with the fact that they're not faithfully reproducing the accent or time period they're writing in. In fact, using modern contractions in a historical or fantasy setting grounds it, and makes it more earthy, and is an easy trick if that's what you're after. So, contracting because it's how people really did speak is sometimes best avoided.

Lastly, if we're in the realm of SF and F, here's a thing that seems to crop up only there.

Omitting contractions makes speech sound pompous, and so I think it became a cliché in seventies spec fic to have powerful non-human goodies and baddies speak in full words; and we somehow all inherited this trope without realising it. So, aliens, angels and elves all seem to drop contractions. (There's even a throwaway joke about that on The Orville so I'm not the only person to notice that.)

Again, I think if you do it, do it consciously. Embrace it and go all in, or don't do it at all. I personally think it's a cliché. But I get it! There's nothing original in writing, so use the stuff that works.

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Contractions! A list to search for it pretty long, so here's the standard ones:

It is, there is.

it will, they will, you will, I will.

They have, you have, we have.

I am, you are, they are, we are.

Will not, have not, has not, do not, can not, are not.

And now it is time for you to let me know what you think in the comments!