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My colleague and I are working on our style used in communications, and we have a question around whether it's acceptable to use "you're" or if we should always write "you are".

Our style guide says:

Our tone is conversational, honest, thoughtful, but never familiar or using slang terms

The specific example we're looking at would be in an email from an IT department of a company to employees with instructions on installing a new system. We want a sub-heading at the end to conclude the message.

And so the heading would read either:

  • You're ready to use [product name]!
  • You are ready to use [product name]!

Which better meets the requirements of our style guide? Is you're too familiar? Slangy? Is you are too stilted to be conversational? Does it convey thoughtfulness? Could one form be more appropriate than another in different circumstances?

There has been discussion on using contractions in formal writing (of which this question has been tagged as a duplicate), but I feel our style guideline is more nuanced than just "formal".

Community
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Tim FitzGerald
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    You're probably right. The close-vote reason should probably be 'Primarily Opinion Based'. There was a specific instruction to close-vote questions relating solely to specific style guides some time ago. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 05 '15 at 20:42

1 Answers1

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"You're" is definitely more conversational and less formal than "you are", so it's a tough call. "You are" is always correct in written English. I'd definitely use it when you want to emphasize that "you ARE ready to use [product name]!" but if you're addressing the user directly with "you" you're being conversational (and the exclamation point implies that too), so "You're ready to use [product name]!" sounds more natural.

Fred Senese
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  • Contractions can be a real pain for people who do not speak English natively. In technical writing I have stopped using them even for the marketing type material. – Val Feb 05 '15 at 15:21
  • @Val Good point. In a short story I wrote recently I had a lot of dialog with a non-native speaker who became more fluent over the course of a few years; she deliberately avoided contractions earlier in the story. – Fred Senese Feb 05 '15 at 15:28
  • In your examples, both "are" and "'re" sound okay, to me. – Greg Lee Feb 05 '15 at 20:12