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Friday, October 16, 2009

Ellipses, and the proper format

In the final revisions of my first book, one of my readers/editors thought I'd incorrectly formatted ellipses, and I had to check the current rules, so here's what I found:

First of all, what are they?

Ellipses are the ". . ." you often see in writing which indicate material was omitted from a quote, or in creative writing, sometimes they are simply used for a long pause.

Formatting:

-Put a space on either side and one between each dot
e.g. He was going to . . . do something, but what?

-If the Ellipses occur at the end of a sentence, include the period and add the ellipses at the end.
e.g. That's what I was going to do. . . .

-With exclamation points and question marks:
"It was going to get me . . . !"
"He didn't . . . ?"

Remember the space between the last dot and the question/exclamation mark.

Source

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