Contractions

No, rest assured, this post will have nothing to do with pregnancy or birth or "uterine contraction", as the dictionary says. It's about contracting words. See, I did it just there, with writing "it's" instead of "it is".

Now some of you may have noticed, or perhaps I am the only one who looks this critically at texts, that I do not use contractions very often. I'd rather write "do not" or "will not" or "we will" than "don't", "won't", or "we'll". When it is better for the speed of reading, I do use them, as with "I'd" above, but most of the time I don't (see?). Why is this so?
Well firstly, I think it just looks better. Something like "I'll" can be very confusing, especially when you read fast. And as I am a fast reader, I sometimes skip words, and if you skip a combination of letters that is actually two words (and maybe even the subject and verb of the sentence), the sentence immediately makes no sense anymore and you have to go back and re-read, whereas you can usually skip single words without losing the train of thought.
But in this time of fast typing and fast reading, people generally do use them. (And go even further than that, saying "imma b thr @ 4" or whatever. Now I do use that form of shorthand typing, but just in whatsapp message or when I've run out of characters in my text messages. Never in "proper" texts. But enough of this aside.) So a second reason not to do this, is the fact that contractions are not allowed in academic essays. It is just one of those things, like "indent the first line of a new paragraph if it does not immediately follow a heading" or writing in the passive voice, that you just need to know and apply. You get used to it pretty quickly, especially if you get your head into the "essay-writing" mode.
However, for me there is a third reason that I have taught myself not to use contractions; NaNoWriMo. In NaNo, you write 50,000 words in a month. If you type "I'll", it counts as one word. If you type "I will", it counts as two. So naturally, you train yourself to type both words out fully, as it will give you one extra word written and one less word you still have to type (those writing in English have it easier anyhow, as "I" and "a" are also words, and there are not many languages in which a single letter is a word that is also used a lot).
So there you have it, my obsession with contractions, or rather with staying away from contractions. Maybe it would be better if more people do this, as there seems to be some confusion about "its" and "it's" and "your" and "you're", and whether it is "wo'nt" or "won't" or even "wo'n't", but that's an issue for another time. If you don't know how to type it, don't type it, I'd say. Unless you're writing an essay, or NaNo, of course.