With that out of the way, on to important matters. From the mind of a twentysomething copy editor, straight to you, it's time for:
Style File -- Quotes
Words such as:
Gonna
Shoulda
Gotta
Should be changed to:
Going to
Should have
Got to
In quoted material. In these cases, people people are speaking in a contracted way, often without knowing it. People don't mean to say "gonna" or "gotta" in sentences such as:
"I'm gonna give him a piece of my mind. I gotta do it!"
The copy editor's job isn't to reproduce every person's dialect. I hope that's obvious. If text truly duplicated what people sounded like, it would be difficult to read -- and ludicrous, to boot.
But here comes the tricky part.
What about a work like "ain't"? Take the example:
"I ain't gonna stop doin' dat, even if ya axe me."
How would you revise that? Here's what I would do (provided the reporter decided the entire quote should be included).
"I ain't going to stop doing that, even if you ask me."
Awkward, I know. But "ain't" is a deliberate word choice, and a recognized slangy way of saying "am not" (which has no contracted form anyway).
"I ain't going to stop" is intrinsically better and more honest than "I am not going to stop," which is correcting the speech to the point that the quotation marks should be taken off.
A newspaper shouldn't go out of its way to make people look dumb. It's not as though most writers and editors are smarter.
But sources have to choose their own words. If they say:
"I'm not gonna do nothing"
We shouldn't fix that double negative, or contraction. Those are choices the speaker made in expressing herself.
"I am not going to do anything." No.
Instead: "I'm not going to do nothing."
There's a fine distinction here. One that risks making us look ridiculous. But we also risk making out sources look ridiculous, if they all speak like English aristocrats. We must report the truth, as accurately as we can.
It's crucial.