Let's say we have a sentence as shown below
"Why can't we use X to do Y?"
How would you rewrite it to avoid using a contraction? Typically, we can replace "can't" by "cannot" or "can not;" for instance
- "She can't find her keys"
- "She cannot find her keys"
- "She can not find her keys"
Applied to the first example this would result in
- "Why cannot we use X to do Y?"
Would the following work?
- "Why can we not use X to do Y?"
For some reason, this sounds a bit awkward to me (however, I am a non-native speaker, and I don't really trust my gut feeling ;)).
So, wow would you make sentences like "Why can't we use X to do Y?" sound more elegant given that you want to avoid using a contraction?
Best Answer
If you wish to rewrite a sentence containing a contraction in a way that does not use the contraction, start with replacing the contraction with the phrase it contracts.
This would become:
This sentence looks fine as it is. If the sentence looks good, there is no need to do more.
Sometimes, though, a sentence rewritten in this way won't read quite right. The example used in the question is a good one.
If we replace the contraction here, we get:
What's happening here is that the word "not", which is an adverb, is separated from the verb it modifies. Start by splitting "cannot" up into its two contained words ("can" and "not"), then use your normal understanding of English sentence structure to move the word "not" to where it needs to be to modify the verb.
This becomes:
And there you are. The adverb is in the right place now.