Oh, ellipses, the confetti of punctuation marks. A little here, a little there, and it feels a little bit like a celebration, no?
Wait, that’s not what you’re going for?
Sure, I talk about ellipses (the plural form of “ellipsis”) in detail in Get a Grip on Your Grammar (Career Press, 2017; HarperCollins India, 2020), but I wanted to return to the old favorite (ahem, overused) punctuation mark to clear up some confusion.
There’s a lot of debate and inconsistency around ellipses, but let’s just move forward with answers aligned with the Chicago Manual of Style (the standard I always use with my fiction editing clients because it’s largely the standard for traditional book publishers).
Here are some basic ellipsis rules you need to know that I’m frequently asked:
Should there be spaces between the dots of ellipses?
Technically, there should be a space between each dot of the ellipsis, but this causes confusion in formatting for many reasons, not the least of which is in line-breaks, where you don’t want to have your ellipsis broken up onto two lines. Thus, some ignore this space between dots style. Is that you? Are you a rebel?
Here’s the secret, though: Did you know an ellipsis is actually its own punctuation mark? It is a singular character on its own, which only appears to be made of spaced periods. Yes, know it, love it, and copy-and-paste it to keep its spread-out yet cohesive format.
If you type “…” into Microsoft Word, as in three periods in a row, MS Word automatically realigns the spaces between dots for you and utilizes this special character, connecting the three dots so that they will never be split amid a line-break. (A little bit of formatting magic, right?)
Or, here’s another little known trick: If you press “Alt” and “Ctrl” and “.” (the period) at the same time in MS Word, the correct, cohesive yet spaced out ellipsis mark will appear. You can also go to “Insert” then “Symbol” to find the ellipsis character, of course, but either way, once you have the correct ellipsis character, you can use the “Find” and “Replace” function to easily clean this up in your entire document if needed.
(Yes, if you’ve ever taken an editing course with me, in person or online, you know how much I love editing tricks with the “Find” and “Replace” function!)
Should there be spaces before and after an ellipsis?
For the Chicago Manual of Style, there should be a space before and after the ellipsis. Yes, it’s true.
For example: “Talking … more talking.”
The only major exception to this is if you have an ellipsis that ends dialogue, at which time, there should be no space between the end of the ellipsis and the quotation mark.
For example: “Talking, talking, talking …”
Do you have more ellipsis questions? If so, let me know, and I can dive deeper for you!
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