Being a Better Writer: The Ellipses and the Em-dash, Odd Forms of Punctuation · 10:58pm Jul 8th, 2019
Welcome back readers! I hope you had, if from the US, a successful and interesting 4th of July, and if not from the US, a solid weekend! I did. For starters, my friends and I gathered and watched all of Season 3 of Netflix’s Stranger Things. I won’t spoil anything (obviously, I mean, come on) but I will say that I think it’s better than the second season. Mostly because they fixed the largest flaw with the second season, which was some weak pacing in the last few episodes. Here everything is much more tightly bound together, and there’s never really a single moment where even if you feel like you can stop that you want to.
So yeah, it’s really good. I do recommend. Next, there are only a few hours left in the Independence Day Sale! By tomorrow, it’ll no longer be available, so if you were planning on grabbing Shadow of an Empire, Colony, Dead Silver, or another book of mine while they were on the cheap, now’s your last chance! You’ve only got until the end of the day!
Finally, just a quick heads-up that we’re about to start the Summer of Cliche Writing Advice here with Being a Better Writer, and we’ve put out requests to you, readers, for every bit of cliche writing advice you’ve ever been told. If you missed the announcement, there’s a lot of cliche writing advice out there that can do more harm than good, especially when it’s taken literally and without the context it once had. So BaBW is going to spend the summer breaking down that advice, stepping back to look at what it really means and what you should be learning from it.
That starts next week and runs through either the summer or until we run out of cliche advice! If you’ve got one that you’ve always heard, go ahead and post it in the comments so it can go on the list!
Right, so with all that said (you read it, right? Sale, Stranger Things, and Summer of Cliche Writing Advice!), let’s talk writing! Specifically, let’s talk about some of the lesser-taught methods of punctuation out there: the ellipses and the em-dash.
You’ve seen them before … Right? In fact, there was one right there! Those three periods right in a row, the “…” That’s an ellipses, and you’ve likely seen one from time to time when reading a book. Or a lot if you read comics, or fairly regularly if you’re reading technical or research papers that use a lot of quotations. Though the use is a bit different in that last one.
Point being, you’ve likely seen it used somewhere. But, even though used on occasion, you don’t see it used as often as, say, the comma, or the period, or the question mark, all of which are regular features of punctuation you’re taught about in a basic school education.
I can’t tell you how much it annoyed me every time I saw that space between the word and the ellipses that follows. It just looks... wrong to me, like some evil sin has been committed. I keep my mouth shut because some people
don’t know how ugly their writing looksjust don’t use grammar in the same way, but I shudder every time I see it, regardless.5086053
Well, you're in luck because it really is up to you!
I'll stick with the spaces though. It's more balanced to the eyes than that lack of a space lololol.
The battle lines are drawn! Let the crusades begin, as they did for PC VS Linux, Sega VS Nintendo!
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The balance is precisely why it’s wrong to me. It shouldn’t be balanced. One of those words is read differently from normal, not both of them, and the ellipse helps to recognize that. Or would if it was allowed to.
But whatever. I shall permit you
to be wrongyour opinion. It would hardly be sporting of me to deny you yourflagrant affront to decencygrammatical quirks when I have my own habits of persistently ignoring certain grammar rules to manipulate reader interpretation. I shall wage no crusade this day.I knew exactly what you were going for with the "..." versus "…"; however, through Chromium, they are both displayed as the single-character version on your website.
I'd jest about the absence of using em dashes for asides and the lack of en dashes (...for the same use-case), and maybe preceding ellipses in this post, but I think keeping it simple is the best way to make sure that what you've discussed does hit home.
My preferential way of typing dashes and ellipse characters is the Compose key, because it's fairly intuitive for a surprisingly large number of common symbols. It might take a bit of finagling, but I've remapped Caps Lock (I have found no better use for it) to be a Compose key on both Linux and Windows, so it's pretty much there for everyone. In that case, it's "[Compose] - - -" for an em dash and "[Compose] - - ." for an en dash. (Three periods for an ellipse, of course.)
There's also Unicode input for some platforms, for which it is "CTRL+Shift+U 2014 [spacebar/return]" for an em dash.