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I'm a soon published author going through my final edit of the book and I got stuck thinking about this one. I understand that when writing this you should type in "There are". When people are saying this though, they usually say it quickly contracting it to "There're". Here's the question: When I am writing what someone is saying, could I spell it as "There're", or will I have to type the correct way of "There are" while risking losing a certain "way of speaking" to the sentence?

I know some of the sentences above may have a slightly strange way of being put forth, but English is not my native language and it's getting late here. I hope you understood my question.

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  • It depends really on what register you're presenting in. Is it formal (albeit not necessarily stuffy) or is it chatty and colloquial?
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Apr 12, 2015 at 23:03
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    If you're quoting directly you're obliged to include whatever contractions the speaker uses, as well as all the words. Never "improve" or "correct" quoted text. If you don't want to reproduce precisely what was said, don't use direct quotation marks.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Apr 12, 2015 at 23:12

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If your stuff is really informal, you can use it, as it's been published, as shown at Google Books (don't use vanilla Google):

"There're several" About 11,900 results

but as shown in the related thread in the answers, many are frowning at it.

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"There're" makes perfect sense for [ðɛɹɹ̩], yet it looks odd, to me. It might distract from what you're trying to write about. How about this? -- Use "there's". It's ordinary to use this with a plural subject in colloquial English.

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  • We can use "comments" to post opinions.
    – Kris
    Commented Apr 13, 2015 at 6:16

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