Three Spaced Periods: How to Format an Ellipsis
Hope you are enjoying the first “hushed October morning mild” of the year.
Welcome to a two-part series about the ellipsis . . . one of my favorite types of punctuation.
The two parts are as follows . . .
How to format an ellipsis
When to use an ellipsis
One of the quirks of being a copyeditor is having strong opinions about things many people don’t care about.
You can persuade me that many style and grammar rules are arbitrary, that the main point is consistency, etc.
But an ellipsis that isn’t formatted as three spaced periods is always going to look wrong to me.
Word has an automatic ellipsis formatting feature, but the ellipsis it creates doesn’t have a sufficient amount of space between periods: … (ellipsis with Word’s automatic formatting . . . all you have to do to apply it is type three periods and then press enter)
All Word does is stop the periods from being completely smushed together: ... (ellipsis without Word’s automatic formatting)
Here is the correct ellipsis format: . . .
It’s easy to remember how to format an ellipsis: space, period, space, period, space, period, space. Yes, it’s extra work as opposed to just hitting the period button three times and letting Word add teeny-tiny spaces, but it looks so much better.
The tricky part with ellipses is how to format them in relation to surrounding punctuation.
If there is a punctuation mark right before the ellipsis, it is included. There is a space between the punctuation mark and the ellipsis.
“O hushed October morning mild, . . . Tomorrow’s wind if it be wild . . .”
“Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; . . . The crows above the forest call . . .”
“Tomorrow they may form and go. . . . Make the day seem to us less brief.”
(Usually, because this is poetry, I would include slashes in between the lines, but I omitted those for clarity.)
Notice that when a quotation mark follows (or precedes) the ellipsis, there is no intervening space (The Chicago Manual of Style 13.55).
“O hushed October morning mild . . .”
“. . . Thy leaves have ripened to the fall.”
One final point: the singular is ellipsis, and the plural is ellipses.
I’ll be back in a few weeks to tell you when and why to use ellipses, but for now try to cultivate an appreciation for the beauty of a properly formatted ellipsis.
Space, period, space, period, space, period, space . . .
Beating through the thicket of English . . . with a toddler and baby in tow,
Rebekah Slonim
L. M. Montgomery, one of my favorite authors, loved to use ellipses. But in this edition of Pat of Silver Bush, the publisher didn’t format the ellipses properly. For shame!