ABSTRACT
Everybody likes a shortcut. Apostrophes give readers and writers the gift of brevity, helping them crisply communicate ownership and competently combine pronouns with shortened verbs. That’s nice. See, that’s a contraction of that is. The apostrophe shows where we squeezed the letter i out. That’s a contraction. As a matter of craft, using contractions indicates a casual and conversational tone. If writers want to make their writing less formal, to sound more like talking, they use contractions. That’s informal. If writers want to sound more formal, they choose to write the words out. That is formal. Ooh-la-la! Even though they mean the same thing, each choice affects the reader differently. Wall charts give us a way to organize our thinking and group like concepts with like concepts.
