ABSTRACT
Contractions such as I’m and don’t are best reserved for informal, conversational writing, and when reporting speech. Although it is correct to use an apostrophe to indicate a missing letter and write: aren’t, can’t, isn’t, it’s, etc., contractions are to be avoided in official letters, reports, academic papers or theses and other types of formal English. Here, the expected forms are: are not, cannot (one word), is not, it is. Using contractions wrongly not only looks very informal, it also leads to mistakes like confusing it’s with the possessive pronoun its, which both sound the same. Also, us is sometimes contracted with verbs like let, as in Let’s go.
