Maddenation
What is an Ellipsis?
To refresh your memory, an “ellipsis” is a typographic mark or series of marks (…, for example) used in writing to indicate an omission, especially of letters or words. By and large, ellipses are written with three dots that represent that omission and/or exclusion of obvious facts.
I used to use ellipses as the dictionary instructs until I saw a writer use four dots to finish his interrupted sentence. I hadn’t seen more than three dots in prose, excluding personal emails (where often 27 dots in a row are necessary to emphasize the potential all-expenses-paid trip to Disney simply by forwarding the email to 60 of my closest friends). Curious that this probably wasn’t a typo but perhaps someone with a better grip on written language, I investigated.
A quick trip to the Wikipedia didn’t help. It emphasized that “there is no such thing as a “four-dot ellipsis.” Hmm. Was the writer just wrong? Doubtful. Then I consulted Houghton Mifflin Guidelines which found the following:
To show an omission at the end or after the completion of a sentence, use three points in addition to the sentence period or other terminal mark.
If you’ve consulted the Wiki, you’ll see that it says essentially this same thing, only a little less explicitly. So that fourth dot is the punctuation of the sentence. That makes complete sense, so much so that I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t figure it out. But it’s one of those things that you shouldn’t have to figure out because it should be automatically done—if you omit the end of the sentence, it’s still a sentence, so you still need punctuation. All sentences need punctuation and an ellipsis is not a punctuation mark.
So, to conclude and clarify, I’ve written the following grammatically correct sentences.
How stupid do you have to be to not know that ellipses…?
Hey…!
So, Lance was all like, “Hey you little…wanna dance?”
So there you have it. Good writers are rarely wrong and typos never slip by. When you think you’re right about something like this, it’s best to consult the web and see for yourself.
Dan • Observations • 03/07/06 • 5 comments
Comments
Dad • 03/11/06 • 11:49 AM:Why couldn’t the period simply be part of what was omitted?
Dan • 03/21/06 • 3:38 PM:Where else in grammar do you simply omit punctuation in certain cases?
Dad • 03/21/06 • 10:42 PM:Actually, I think this is the only case.
Patrick • 03/23/06 • 11:54 AM:I haven’t studied this for a while, but it seems like you two are missing each other’s arguments. My understanding is that when you quote something, you are free to alter punctuation and incidentals (capital letters, misspelled words, etc.). As for the period next to the ellipsis, it would depend on the sense you want to give to the quoted material. If you want to preserve two sentences as two sentences, then use a period. If you want to combine them, then gobble up the period within the ellipsis, change capital letters to lowercase, whatever.
But Dan is right: no two- or five-dot ellipses, please.
Dan • 03/25/06 • 12:01 AM:Alright. Makes sense.
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