Ellipsis

[Amy Z <lupinesque@yahoo.com>]

Haggridd wrote:

> When I beta read and come across ellipsis at the end of a complete 
> sentence, I leave a space between the period (full stop, for our 
U.K. 
> friends) and the ellipsis,  e.g.,  "The quick brown fox jumped over 
> the lazy dog. ..."
> 
> Whether this is given as a formal rule anywhere I do not know, but 
it 
> clarifies matters for me.

The way I learned it was that *when quoting* and omitting only part 
of a sentence, one uses three dots (does one call them periods if 
they aren't being used as periods/full stops?), and *when quoting* 
and omitting an entire sentence, one uses four dots.  It is never 
correct in American usage to leave the dots unspaced, though as a 
lazy typist, I go back and forth.  The only time one does not put a 
space on either side of each one of the dots is when the first dot 
also acts as a full stop, so that it follows right upon the word that 
precedes it.  It's been a long time since middle-school grammar, 
though.

Thus one would ellipsisize <g> the above paragraph like this:

"The way I learned it was that . . . one uses three dots . . . "

or 

"The way I learned it was that *when quoting* and omitting only part 
of a sentence, one uses three dots (does one call them periods if 
they aren't being used as periods/full stops?), and *when quoting* 
and omitting an entire sentence, one uses four dots. . . . It's been 
a long time since middle-school grammar, though."

That's for quoting, where there are rules designed to be as clear as 
possible about what has been omitted.  When one is simply using an 
ellipsis to indicate a pause, I think one always uses three dots.  I 
suppose it might follow that if one wants to imply that an entire 
sentence was considered and left unspoken, one would use four . . . .

<g>

Aside:  Judy Blume always drove me nuts because she used so many 
ellipses.

Amy Z