Grammer a Week 13: Ellipses · 11:52pm May 15th, 2015
This is Grammer a Week, the periodic blog program-thing where I address a frequently broken grammar rule and tell you how to fix it. This week's installment is about the ellipsis. The ellipsis, otherwise known as the "dot-dot-dot," is a piece of punctuation that is very easily overused. It's powerful punctuation, undoubtedly, but only in moderation.
Use of the Ellipsis
The ellipsis has a number of uses. Its most formal is to indicate that you omitted something in a direct quotation. I'll take something from our favorite theme song:
I used to wonder what friendship could be . . . until you all shared its magic with me.
There's another "♪my little pony" refrain in between the two clauses, but it's omitted with an ellipsis. If it's not relevant to what you need to say, and it can be omitted without changing meaning of the source, you can use an ellipsis. This use, however, is rather rare in fiction, so I'll move on to the uses of the ellipsis that are likely more relevant to you.
The first use is to imply that a character is trailing off, or has unfinished thoughts:
"I don't know, Rarity," Twilight confessed. "I just don’t know . . ."
Note that this shows that a character is trailing off on their own volition; they weren't cut off by something external. If you want to show that a character was cut off, use an em dash (—).
The second use of the ellipsis in prose is to imply a long pause or a break in thought:
Rarity fretted. "I thought . . . I thought that Sweetie Belle would be back by now."
As for capitalization rules in these cases, only capitalize the letter after the ellipsis if you intend that clause to form a complete sentence (or the word is normally capitalized anyway). If I started the phrase after the ellipsis with "that," it would not be capitalized.
Unfortunately, this is the ellipsis that many people tend to use too often:
"I . . . I think . . ." Fluttershy stuttered. "I think we should . . . um . . . go to the train station now . . . if that's okay with you . . . um."
Why is this wrong? Well it's not, in the strictest grammar sense, but it's in rather bad taste. The ellipsis is the slowest punctuation mark you can add to text:
comma (,) < semicolon (;) < colon (:) < em dash (—) ≈ period (.) < ellipsis (. . .) *
Adding commas to text isn't jarring because it only confers a quick pause to the text (unless you use one every other word or something); adding a lot of ellipses is because it slows your text down to a crawl. I don't want to tell you how to style your prose (that's not what these blog posts are for), but when Fluttershy is speaking with more dots than words, you might want to rethink your ellipsis use.
Forming the Ellipsis
Believe it or not, there are some three ways you can correctly form an ellipsis depending on what style guide you use. The easiest method is just to type three periods in a row (...), though if you think that ellipsis is too cramped, you can opt for the preformed ellipsis character (…). In most fonts, it's a little bit wider than three periods next to each other (though that's hard to see in Open Sans, the font this blog is written in). Most modern word processors will autocorrect three periods to the ellipsis character. Otherwise, on a Windows machine, you can type Alt+0133 on the number pad for an ellipsis. On a Mac, type Option+; (semicolon).
As for me? I actually think both of those uses are too cramped; I use three spaced periods (. . .) instead.† It's actually the method advocated by the Chicago Manual of Style, the primary style guide I use.
Whatever method you choose, make sure to add a leading and trailing space to your ellipsis (as in words . . . more words).‡ And please don't use more than three dots in an ellipsis.§ If you need to confer a longer pause than an ellipsis would give you, break up your text with extra words; don't add more dots.
* This is an ordering I reasoned through reading a bunch of style guides; I'm not actually completely certain that it's correct.
† CMOS actually suggests that you use nonbreaking spaces between your dots, though this really shouldn't bother you unless you're a typographer.
‡ I've actually seen on Fimfiction and elsewhere, however, that a lot of people omit the leading space on an ellipsis. I'm not sure why this became a thing because I can't find a style guide (other than Fimfiction's own) that says this is acceptable. But since everyone else thinks this is fine, I guess it is for me, too. Though if someone could find me a style guide that vouches for this convention, that'd be very nice.
§ The only case where you would see four dots in a row is if, when omitting a portion of a direct quote, the clause before the ellipsis happens to be a complete sentence. In that case, you would finish the sentence with a period, then append three more to indicate the omission. ‖
‖ Never included so many footnotes before. Whoo! ¶
¶ What the heck, let's teach you about footnotes, too! Traditionally, the order of marking footnotes is the one I used: * † ‡ § ‖ ¶. If you need more, just go over the same symbols, but doubled ( ** †† ‡‡, etc). Though if you really need that many, I suggest you go to numbers instead. They should also be in superscript, but I can't do that in a blog post.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. I'm always open to suggestions for future Grammer a Week posts.
You need to do more of these wee guides. They're a fun read.
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I actually have a backlog of posts built up somewhere, but I ran out of steam some time ago. There's only so much grammar someone can talk about before you start running out of ideas. I'm open to starting a "Season 2" of sorts of these weekly posts if I have enough content (and time) to work with, though. If you have ideas of things I haven't covered yet, PM me!
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Not exactly grammar-related, but how about book-spacing versus internet-spacing?
Afraid I can't help with the official style guide bit, but my understanding is that variations in spacing are used to indicate what the ellipsis is intended to do. For example,
"I used to wonder what friendship could be ... until you all shared its magic with me."
would indicate that the ellipsis is standing in place of omitted text, whereas
"I used to wonder what friendship could be... until you all shared its magic with me."
would indicate that the ellipsis shows the
speakersinger trailing off. In contrast, I don't recall ever having seen the " . . . " version written without an initial space, meaning in cases where multiple uses are plausible you're always forced to guess.