Purely Technical Question: Contraction Usage February 28, 2006
Posted by fredcharles in Uncategorized.10 comments
I have a purely technical question. When is it not okay to use contractions? I am looking at this purely from a fiction stand point. My characters use contractions during the dialogue segments. People generally talk in contrations, for example, most of say:
“I can’t do that.”
Instead of:
“I can not do that.”
But what about all of the non-dialogue text in your prose. If you are describing something, do you use contractions? To me, the rest of the text seems to be more formal than dialogue. I’ve checked the style manuals that I have and can’t seem to find any reference to this usage. Maybe I’m not looking in the right spots.
An example of what I’m talking about would be something like this:
He couldn’t write a blog post today because he was too busy.
or
He could not write a blog post today because he was too busy.
Which usage would you use in your fiction?
