I have ranted here about apostrophe usage before, but in that post I focused on plurals and possessives. Now I want to mention contractions.
In English, we sometimes put two words together in a shortened form called a contraction. Examples include: can’t for can not, I’m for I am, haven’t for have not, we’d for we would or we had, she’s for she is or she has, and doesn’t for does not.
But rather frequently these days, I’ve (or I have) been noticing that people don’t (do not) quite get contractions. So instead of writing contractions mentioned above, they write: can’not, I’am, haven’not (or haven’ot), she’is, and so on.
Of course, if you use a spell-checker, it will mark all of those spellings as wrong. But if you don’t understand the rule, you probably won’t know how to fix it (and the spell-checker doesn’t always offer correct suggestions, which is one reason why people shouldn’t rely on such programs).
If you are using a shortened form, that means you are removing letters; a contraction is not just adding an apostrophe but keeping the same number of letters. Also, you might want to keep in mind that contractions are rather informal and should probably be avoided in formal writing.
--Curly
2 comments:
i dsilike using contractions I like it much better wehn someone says do not. not sure why i think like this.
Well, people usually think that using contractions is informal, so it is recommended that you avoid them in formal situations, whether when speaking or writing. Not using them can make you sound stilted, though. Foreigners learning English tend not to use them, but they would sound more natural if they did.
--Curly
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