They say content is king, so it’s worth taking a look at punctuation now and then.
##The ellipsis
It’s a form of punctuation that you probably use (heck, even fluff posters love it [thanks dear…]), but which you might not understand too well. Indeed, it’s a much abused punctuation mark.
Important things to know about the ellipsis
The ellipsis is a series of three dots. Yes, three … not any number you like [looking at you, fluffers dear…].
The ellipsis is not a bunch of individual periods / full stops strung together. It’s a singular entity in its own right. So please don’t type it as periods.
How to type an ellipsis
You can type an ellipsis character on your keyboard. On a PC, you can press the alt + 0 1 3 3
keys. On a Mac, it’s option + ;
.
On the web, you can just type the character into your HTML as described above. But if you are worried about character encoding, you can use the …
entity reference (or if that’s not geeky enough for you, try the hexadecimal reference …
instead).
Use cases for the ellipsis
There are all sorts of uses for the ellipsis, including—
- where words are left out of a quotation (“Four score and seven years ago …”)
- to indicate an interruption, hesitation or pause in dialogue or thought (I just wanted to add … no, never mind)
- to indicate a trailing off or something left for the imagination (and, as for what I’d like to do to fluff posters if I could get my hands on them, well …)
Presenting the ellipsis
This is where things get a little more opinionated, as there are various preferred practices. I’ll just give you my recommendations for using the ellipsis, because everyone else is wrong anyway.
In most cases, there should be a space before and after an ellipsis: He was my friend … or so I believed.
An ellipsis at the end of a sentence performs the same function as a period/full stop, so you don’t need anything extra: This will do the trick … Nothing else is needed between sentences.
However, where appropriate, other punctuation marks can be used together with an ellipsis: What else could we do …? There was no other option …! (Notice that there’s no gap between the ellispsis and the following punctuation mark.)
Some further examples:
- We stood before the memorial, saying as one, “Lest we forget …”.
- “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. … I come to bury Caesar, not to priase him.”
- But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? … It is Juliet, lighting a cigarette …
There are many more things that could be said about the use of this punctuation mark, but it’s worth making sure the above basics are in place before going further.
So, what do you think? Do you use the ellipse much, and has this changed the way you think about it at all?