Premise

You might have seen ellipses in all sorts of places: news headlines, advertising, and even personal text messages. But what are they supposed to really do? And when, how, and why do you use them…?

There are actually several ways that ellipses can be (and should not be) used. So let’s break down a few of the most common examples.

Examples

To Omit Non-essential Information

Sometimes you have a great quote to include in your work, but, well, not all of it is quite so great, or necessary. As such, you may want to still use the content but omit extraneous information that isn’t relevant to identifying your point. Take the following example:

The doctor found that “These patients actually weren’t sick with what we originally thought. I’ve seen similar cases throughout my time as a doctor. In fact, once, I remember there was a mother and daughter who were convinced that they had the flu, but it turned out to just be head colds. In this particular case, they had actually developed pneumonia.”

Now, say that what matters to you is that this doctor is explaining the example about “these patients,” and that the example in the middle of the quote about the “mother and daughter” isn’t really relevant or distracts from the main point. In this case, you could simply omit this example by adding in an ellipses for what you cut out. For example:

The doctor found that “These patients actually weren’t sick with what we originally thought. I’ve seen similar cases throughout my time as a doctor… In this particular case, they had actually developed pneumonia.”

What this shows a reader is that there’s actually more context to this original quote, but that you as a writer decided that it was unnecessary to what main point you wanted to highlight for your audience. This is a perfectly acceptable action—as long as it is done clearly, correctly, and with good intentions (the lattermost of which, we’ll discuss in a moment).

To Dramatically Shift Tone

Sometimes…ellipses can create…drama… As you can see from my previous sentence…the pauses created by ellipses can also create a sense of anticipation or uncertainty. You often see this usage more in dialogue in creative ways, but it’s plausible that you could use this technique in other presentational or media situation as mentioned earlier. Just look at some examples with and without ellipses:

• “I love you.”
  • “I love you…”
• “If you don’t listen, I’m not sure we can work together.”
  • “If you don’t listen, I’m not sure we can work together…”
• “He said he would support me no matter what.”
  • “He said he would support me…no matter what.”

If you compare each version, the ones with ellipses make us wonder: why are we trailing off with our thoughts? Are we less certain of their full meaning? It’s interesting how here, you’re not explicitly omitting information as per our previous section’s more formal examples. But there’s more of an implication to the vagueness of ending sentences by trailing off…

Further Considerations

We should also note how not to use ellipses. Just take this quote from The Bible as a perfect example:

“In the beginning God created…the earth with a curse.”

Now this line may sound ominous—and that’s because it is. But it’s also because we’ve taken the first few words from the beginning of the Old Testament (The Bible) and the very last few words from the very end of it. Yup, we omitted the entire middle part of the whole rest of the work. Rest assured that the original full lines from which both these snippets were taken are much different than what we’ve disingenuously pasted together here.

Keep a keen eye out for situations where quotes seem disingenuously presented in this way!