: Re: When to use contractions and when to use complete words? These are some passages from Man-Eating Cats by Haruki Murakami. He'd been dead set against out marriage from the start, and his

Contractions are often considered inappropriate in formal writing. The more formal, the less acceptable.

They are always acceptable in dialog if that is how the character would talk in real life.

Probably debatable in narration in a novel.

Where acceptable, whether to use a contraction depends on the rhythm of the sentence. Sometimes a contraction makes a sentence or part of a sentence seem too abrupt. For example, consider "Where is he?" You could use a contraction and replace this with "Where's he?" But this sounds very abrupt. I often hear people say, "Where's he at?" which grates on my nerves for some reason. You shortened the sentence from "Where is he?" to "Where's he?", but then you apparently decided this was too short, so you stuck a useless extra word, "at" on the end to pad it back out! :-P

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: Techniques for creating variety in prose When I write my short stories, I usually end up using a direct style as follows: Tim remembered the day he had to say goodbye to Cathy. He did

@Annie587

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: Referring to people in a book I'm writing a book (travelogue) about Japan, comparing it to Sweden, where I'm from. During my travels I communicated mostly in Japanese but occasionally in English

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: Overusing "the" and "I" I'm not a native English speaker, and I find that my English writing contains too many definite article "the" when writing scientific reports, and too many "I" when writing

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: What kind of rhythm should I use for these settings? I am not particularly experienced with using rhythm in creative writing so please note that I am only a beginner. By "rhythm" I am referring

: Re: When to use contractions and when to use complete words? These are some passages from Man-Eating Cats by Haruki Murakami. He'd been dead set against out marriage from the start, and his

More posts by @Annie587

: Techniques for creating variety in prose When I write my short stories, I usually end up using a direct style as follows: Tim remembered the day he had to say goodbye to Cathy. He did

: Referring to people in a book I'm writing a book (travelogue) about Japan, comparing it to Sweden, where I'm from. During my travels I communicated mostly in Japanese but occasionally in English

: Overusing "the" and "I" I'm not a native English speaker, and I find that my English writing contains too many definite article "the" when writing scientific reports, and too many "I" when writing

: What kind of rhythm should I use for these settings? I am not particularly experienced with using rhythm in creative writing so please note that I am only a beginner. By "rhythm" I am referring

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