Ellipsis and rules of spelling

Sat Mar 1 20:09:48 UTC 2003

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "David <dfrankiswork at n...>" 
<dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:
> > Heidi revealed: 
> > 
> > >Heidi, who didn't realise that there should be four dots in an 
> > elipse at the end of a sentence until she started beta reading
> 
> ER responded:
> > 
> > I didn't know that! I always use three. And I put a space before 
> > them. So too does JKR. 
> 
> I suspect that, along with ER and JKR, nearly all of us didn't 
> know that rule.
> 
> I think it is questionable that a rule which hardly anybody knows 
> or keeps can be so called.  It may be a Fictionalley rule, but 
> there is no final authority for spelling and grammar in English 
> other than what people do.

I don't know about that, since people do a lot of things incorrectly 
when writing in English.  There ARE rules of grammar and 
punctuation, even though some of them may not make sense to some 
folks.

I learned the rules about ellipses when I was in high school, 
working on research papers for the first time.  When quoting a 
source directly, instead of paraphrasing, we were taught that 
anything we did not include in the middle of the quote (what we 
would call "snipping" online) is replaced with three periods if it 
is in the middle of a sentence and the continuation of the quote is 
part of the same sentence.  If the "snipped" portion was followed by 
something in another sentence, in order to indicate that the 
previous sentence had ended (even though the text was not given in 
the quoted material) we were supposed to use four dots (the ellipsis 
is still three dots, but the period being added indicates that the 
sentence has ended).  One never puts a space before the dots.  They 
are supposed to follow directly after the end of the previous word.

It is also very easy to determine how to punctuate dialogue, 
contrary to an earlier post claiming that the rules for this do not 
make sense.  If the text adjacent to the quote is giving information 
about who is speaking, it is considered to be the same sentence.  If 
this information is not given in the adjacent text, it is a separate 
sentence.  For instance:

"Hi, Harry!  How was your holiday?" asked Colin.

is one sentence because the nonquoted text concerns who spoke and 
how they spoke ("asked").  The "how" could be any sort of verb like 
shouted, whispered, said, inquired, etc.  As long as the text 
identifies the speaker and how they spoke, it's part of the same 
sentence.  As such, this text should not begin with a capital 
letter, like this:

"Hi, Harry!  How was your holiday?" Asked Colin.

This is something we see frequently at Fiction Alley.  An author 
doing this is treating the nonquoted text as a new sentence by 
capitalizing it.  True, it follows a questions mark, which might 
normally be considered the end of a sentence.  However, in this 
case, it is only the end of a quote, and necessary because the 
quoted material is a question.  Question marks, exclamation marks 
and commas are acceptable endings for quotes, as it is permissible 
to continue the sentence after that with unquoted material 
pertaining to the speaker.  A period at the end of the above quote 
would not be correct (even if the quote is were not a question).  A 
period is only ever a full stop.  Question marks and exclamation 
marks are not necessarily full stops.  They are communicating 
certain ways of speaking when used in quotes.  They are only full 
stops when used in unquoted material.

Some folks want to link material to quotes that should be separate, 
such as:

Hermione put her books down, "Oh, I have so much work to do!"

While the quote being adjacent to a passage mentioning Hermione 
strongly implies that she is the speaker, the passage doesn't 
actually contain any verb concerning how she spoke.  It should 
appear as a separate sentence:

Hermione put her books down. "Oh, I have so much work to do!"

If the author wanted to link the two passages, a "speaking" verb 
would have to be included:

Hermione put her books down, groaning, "Oh, I have so much work to 
do!"

Now it is one sentence.  A quote can be considered to be something 
like an object in a sentence.  An example of a sentence with a 
subject, verb and object is, "He hit the ball," with "he" being the 
subject, "hit" being the verb and "the ball" being the object.  If 
the sentence were a quote, it might be, "He said, 'I'll be there.'"  
The entire quote can be considered an object in the sentence.  
Within that, ideally, the quote will be grammatical, but in English, 
rules for this are more flexible, since quotes are reflecting how 
people speak.

Since I'm not spending much time dinging on FA lately, that will 
have to suffice for my contribution to better grammar and 
punctuation in the world. :D

--Barb

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Psychic_Serpent
http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Barb

Chapter 17 of the Triangle Prophecy is up!
http://www.schnoogle.com/cgi-bin/links/jump.cgi?ID=7497