Why are contractions considered informal? 👀

My English teachers always told me that contractions are informal but they never explained why… :no_mouth::green_heart::eyes::sparkles:

Does anyone know the reason why contractions are considered informal? :eyes:

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If I were to make a language, I’dn’t’ve added a rule so ridiculous :star_struck::star_struck:

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10/10

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The only reason I wrote that reply :star_struck:

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Because it makes the text or whatever you’re writing shorter?? And I dunno why, words like, can’t, I’ve, and don’t sound informal to me.

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i don’t think writing concisely is inherently informal :thinking:

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Am I the only one who thought you were talking about labor contractions :rofl::rofl:

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Nope I thought so too :rofl:

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Pretty much yeah :rofl:

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I discard the use of contractions a lot of times not just to sound formal, but because my English sounds awkward a lot of time because I choose not to speak a lot in real life

I am a native English speaker, but I’m awkward at my own freaking language :sob: I sometimes will randomly type “I am” which makes things more awkward lmao

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that grammar scares me

contractions are overrated

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They’ren’t

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overrated’th

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Grammarn’t

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you suck’th

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I asked my English teacher two years ago. She explained to me that contractions are okay to be used as long as you are using them for a conversational purpose. Because we mostly tend to sound informal in conversations with someone. Obviously we will use “haven’t” instead of “have not” to convey something through speech (unless we want to sound too Victorian era-ish or something then okay :relieved:).

During my 10th grade in English exams, we used to get a question to draft a speech between two people. I noticed that I lost some marks at the places where I wrote “need not have” or “did not see” i.e. formal expressions. Speeches usually tend to be informal so it’s more realistic to use contractions there. But when you are writing something such as an essay for college, a letter to your class teacher, etc, it’s better to not use such contractions because they are a formal authority to you and you have to be professional.

Just imagine writing “I’m stickin’ to that plan” to your teacher. It may be okay to say it in conversation but while writing, you gotta be specific and have a professional tone. You have to be formal. Also, many people don’t use contractions to put emphasis. “No, you can’t” seems to be less emphasized than “No, you cannot.” It all depends on your usage of tone at the end :woman_shrugging:

I think it’s because you just leave out letters, so you don’t write the word correctly and that makes it informal. But I don’t know, our teacher explained it to us as “It just sounds informal, that’s why it is informal” :joy:

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