I'm considering writing the following in an email to a friend.
I'm sure the exam'll be easy.
But it just sounds wrong to me, even in an informal setting....
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1Personally I have never seen will shortened with a noun in that way. A person who is speaking informally (and possibly quickly) might say something that sounds how you have written it there (such that it sounds something like "I'm sure the examall be easy", but to me it would be very unusual to write it that way, even in an informal setting.– PaulCommented Jan 30, 2020 at 15:10
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3Perfectly natural. It'll be easy to find plenty of written examples in NGrams or Google Books.– FumbleFingersCommented Jan 30, 2020 at 15:45
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I concur with @FumbleFingers. It's not common, but it's hardly unheard of and entirely correct. Y'all'll be glad to have a tool like that in your kit.– KnotWrightCommented Jan 30, 2020 at 16:48
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1"It'll" is quite common (so much so that some swipe keyboards have it in their built-in dictionaries). Combinations with arbitrary nouns, not so!– TypeIACommented Jan 30, 2020 at 19:03
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2 Answers
People do speak like this. How you wrote it is correctly spelled.
It's helpful to put this in the same category as slang - you do not want to write it this way in professional or formal writing.
An author of in a book of fiction (or a comic book)P may do this, where the author is writing how people talk, but you wouldn't see this outside of that context normally.
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1"You do not want to write it this way in professional or formal writing." One shouldn't even write this way in normal casual settings. This isn't even done for dialogue in books except in special circumstances such as mimicking a specific dialect.– TypeIACommented Jan 30, 2020 at 17:48
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The Touchstone TEFL course (from Cambridge English) gives specific examples including various nouns (friend'll, parents'll, class'll). It's true you rarely see those written forms - but OP asked about writing and speaking, and unquestionably almost all native speakers routinely make such contractions in speech. Which is "real" English, to which the orthographic representation is only loosely related. Commented Jan 31, 2020 at 13:00
So some people here say you can write it like that but it's super informal and kind of weird to do so.
"It'll" however is fine and I agree that sounds OK. What are other examples ? I can only think of personal pronouns....