hink: thanks for stopping in! I’m an — man myself. I use it way too much. I found myself writing a sentence the other day that had a chain of, like, four of them. Can I not complete a clause? Must I leave them hanging??

Typography is an interesting subject. I wish I knew more about it, other than “I think Arial sucks.”

Then I forced myself to type … every time I wanted to use one. That solved it rather abruptly. My main crutch–though I must say I’m getting better–is my capricious and uneven use of the – and the —.

Whoah. Pardon me! Markup and typography have been the focus of my research lately, and I’m a little out of hand with it all…

(A correct use of ellipsis in action!)

Andy: I had to crib the details from my grammar book. All I actually remembered was that if you ended a sentence with ellipses, you needed to add a period, too. You can probably hold off on suing SMU.

Mal: I don’t know, but every elipsis, I have to stop and give it a long pause, and then a “revelation” stress after I read it in my head. This makes the reading take longer, and it sounds annoying, too. This… COULD be… THE most… IMPORTANT… DAY… OF the week… it just slows everything down.

Oooh, but good thought on the arduous thought process. But this email did not contain arduous thoughts. It was just… thoughts. Comments. Ah well.

I have to admit, though, that I tend to engage in some e.e. cummings-esque ramblings on instant messenger. I get sloppy and stop capitalizing and punctuating properly — runons become an m.o. instead of an exception. It is a little embarassing to admit. I just get lazy.

But, really, that last paragraph of yours, Andy, is exactly my question. How do these people spend their ellipsis-placing time? Are they thinking of the next thought and want us to have a visual of that (obviously arduous) thought process? Or are they really sitting there, pressing the button over and over (a visual of my mother trying to use the mouse comes to mind: she punches the left button over and over again instead of holding it down to, say, scroll).

But an interesting fact: There are two situations where you should actually use a fourth dot (essentially, you’re creating an ellipsis plus a period):

1) If the ellipses fall at the end of a sentence, add a sentence-ending period after the ellipsis. 2) When you’re using the ellipsis to represent a section omitted from a quote and if you’ve omitted a sentence or more and if the quoted words before and after the omission are independent clauses, then add a fourth dot to the ellipsis.

And speaking of e.e. cummings, if we’re copying a poem and cut out one or more complete lines, you should indicate the cut with a whole line of spaced dots.

And think of it in that perennially annoying “It could be worse!” state of mind. At least it isn’t the e.e.cummings complex, where no letters are capitalized. Ugh.