It depends on the sophistication of the audience: who will read and maintain the code?

Contractions and shortcuts can add clarity, but they can be over done.

Just as with natural language, double negatives, complicated compound clauses, and large distances between the referred and the referrent -- or, as this interruption demonstrates, mid-sentence diversions, within long rambling sentences that try to do too much and thus don't do it well, compared to simpler structure -- can all serve to make a the reader of code or of prose work harder, and possibly make mistakes.

print "foo!" unless /\S/; # too many negatives 

if (grep {is_important{$_}} map {mangle{$_}} $obj->method; # too compl
+icated, too much span

{
 #begin brace1
  {
   #begin brace2
    {
     #begin brace3
     ...
     #begin brace-n

       # too much nesting!

# and so forth
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water

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