On Friday, February 22, 2002, at 06:13  PM, Brian Randall wrote:

Larry F wrote:

<<It depends on _how_ you are using them. I use ellipses for two main
effects:

1.)  Trailing off at the end of a sentence--
    "If you gave Mihoshi the keys, then that means..."  In this case, 
the
next word would be capitalized, because it's a new sentence.

2.)  A pause in speaking rhythm, or a hesitation while searching for the
right word--
    "Kasumi is dancing around in the kitchen, only wearing a negligee?
That's... disturbing."
--or--
    "Finding out about Princess Fatora's... preferences... can be quite
shocking if you don't know her."  Since the word is part of the 
sentence,
the following one is not capitalized.>>

    As far as I can tell, those are correct, but....

    Everyone forgot to mention that an elipses that terminates a
sentence should be trailed by a period, which makes the matter a bit
clearer:

    "This dialogue is just.... I can't finish." vs. "This dialogue is
just... stilted."

    Find out more than you'll ever need to know about it here:
http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/ellipsis.htm

I also mentioned privately that ellipses should not have a single space 
after them like both Larry and Brian had here, unless there are spaces 
throughout, or they terminate sentences. This way . . . is correct, as 
is this way. . . . When set to type. ellipses sometimes do not have any 
spaces between the points, in which case this way...would be correct, as 
would be this way....

That web page is unfortunately not really a good guide as it is not even 
internally consistent. It may be a question of bad html formatting, as 
some of the ellipses are left as periods with spaces while some are 
encoded as the ellipsis character. One sentence ends like this. . . . 
Another ends like this ... . And another like this. ... The rules 
explained on the page allow for either the first one or the second two 
to be correct, but not all of them.

The Chicago Manual of Style (used by most publishing companies) mentions 
two methods of using ellipses, and neither allow the "... ." and ". ..." 
uses. The distinction is simply whether or not you ever use four points 
as Brian states above. The manual recommends that you do use four dots 
at the ends of sentences, but allows three if the author is internally 
consistent. (See Chicago 14th edition, 10.48-10.59)

Manuscript format uses the spaces, but there are several things in 
manuscript format (most notably, underlining to indicate italics) that 
are not allowed by ASCII, so fanfiction can't--and in some cases, 
shouldn't--follow manuscript format all the time. (Manuscript format is 
also always double-spaced, and published fiction is always single-spaced 
with no extra lines between paragraphs, but ASCII fanfiction seems to 
work very well single-spaced with one blank line between paragraphs.)

Anyway it would be "This dialogue is just.... I can't finish." vs. "This 
dialogue is just...stilted."

I don't want to belabor a grammar point on the public list, but I'd 
rather comment than see an error perpetuated.

Peter


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