I’m not a native speaker and I’ve written plenty of awful English, but “never contract” is just bullshit they tell you in case you’ll have a career writing important English texts.
Cannot can be contracted, but it depends on context. When you’re talking or when you’re quoting something someone said (even in formal context), you can use words like “gonna”, “can’t”, and a whole bunch of other stuff that English teachers don’t like, because accuracy is more important than perceived grammatical correctness. Imagine writing an essay on “You cannot touch this” by M.C. Hammer, you’re not going to rewrite the lyrics!
Even in (informal) writing, it’s fine to contract such words. However, you need to know when native speakers do or don’t. Contractions aren’t just fine and replace, you need to get a sense of what “feels” English or you’ll write weird (but technically correct) sentences like these.
In the case of “it’s what it’s”, the “it is” part is being stressed, so contracting it is weird. On the other hand, nobody will bat an eye if you write “it’s raining” outside academic work; the “it” and “is” are just there to communicate “raining”. In the case of “cannot” I’d argue that “No, you can’t” is a perfectly natural response, because the “no” at the start is more than clear enough about the intention of the sentence.
I wasn’t trying to imply that contracting is always wrong. Rather, it is not always right.
In the case of “it’s what it’s”, the “it is” part is being stressed, so contracting it is weird.
This is why I find contracting “You are already“ weird. To me, the stress is on the are. However, after reading and re-reading the statement in my head, I can feel people stressing the already instead. To those, “You’re already” would probably be fine.
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I’m not a native speaker and I’ve written plenty of awful English, but “never contract” is just bullshit they tell you in case you’ll have a career writing important English texts.
Cannot can be contracted, but it depends on context. When you’re talking or when you’re quoting something someone said (even in formal context), you can use words like “gonna”, “can’t”, and a whole bunch of other stuff that English teachers don’t like, because accuracy is more important than perceived grammatical correctness. Imagine writing an essay on “You cannot touch this” by M.C. Hammer, you’re not going to rewrite the lyrics!
Even in (informal) writing, it’s fine to contract such words. However, you need to know when native speakers do or don’t. Contractions aren’t just fine and replace, you need to get a sense of what “feels” English or you’ll write weird (but technically correct) sentences like these.
In the case of “it’s what it’s”, the “it is” part is being stressed, so contracting it is weird. On the other hand, nobody will bat an eye if you write “it’s raining” outside academic work; the “it” and “is” are just there to communicate “raining”. In the case of “cannot” I’d argue that “No, you can’t” is a perfectly natural response, because the “no” at the start is more than clear enough about the intention of the sentence.
I wasn’t trying to imply that contracting is always wrong. Rather, it is not always right.
This is why I find contracting “You are already“ weird. To me, the stress is on the are. However, after reading and re-reading the statement in my head, I can feel people stressing the already instead. To those, “You’re already” would probably be fine.