I wrote draft #1 without much thought about grammar, punctuation or – most especially – commas and abbreviations.
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but we tend not to use them much in speech nowadays. We can cheerfully write whole sentences and paragraphs without feeling the need to invoke that little item divider at all. And I did.
Reading back at the editing stage, deciding to change the voices, made me use a much more formal kind of language for my narrative, to contrast with the more casual tone in the contemplative voice.
A formal kind of language doesn’t use abbreviations, so no I’ll, they’re, we’ve, he’d, etc. Everything has to be written out in full – and still flow.
It does, on the other hand, make good use of commas and my narrative text now has lots of them. Hmm. Maybe too many.
I read a book recently which also gave no thought to commas or abbreviations, and it did mar my enjoyment of the book. It was sloppy and overly – unnecessarily – casual. This is possibly my Englishness coming out, but I do like things to be clear and – yes, quite precise.
I’m due to do another editing round before publication. It’s quite likely that lots of the commas, with which I’ve now, possibly, over-compensated, will be ditched.