On Sunday, November 16, 2003, at 12:41 PM, Brian Randall wrote:

     Akane turned to a stunned redhead at the door, who seemed 
somehow
vaguely familiar-- as if she'd met her in passing.  What did this
girl have to do with Ranma?  For a moment, jealousy began to raise
it's head, but she flattened it with the mental equivalent of a
mallet.  She would-- did-- trust Ranma.  She HAD to.

"its head"

Dude, quit with the messed-up dashes.  It's annoying!  >_<

    Hmm.  Peter, what does the Chicago Manual of style say about proper
dash/hyphen usage?  I'd offer my suggestions, but I don't actually 
know....

Ack, that's twice now you've invoked my name and made reference to 
Chicago while responding to a Haynie fic.

In any case, spacing around dashes should be consistent--either no 
spaces or one space on each side. Two hyphens are a manuscript 
substitute for the dash, and besides, the dash is not in the standard 
low ASCII set and thus causes problems transferring between platforms, 
the same way curly quotes do.

But I also should mention that although Chicago is the main style guide 
for many publishing companies, it is meant to be used as a style GUIDE, 
not book of style LAWS. For example, when mentioning the serial comma 
("one, two, and three" vs. "one, two and three") it speaks of "closed" 
and "open" punctuation styles, where the first example is from the 
former and the second example is from the latter. Now, while I can 
think of very good reasons to prefer the former (such as amusing 
sentences like "This book is dedicated to my parents, Jesus Christ and 
L. Ron Hubbard"), there are some publishing companies or publications 
that prefer the latter. In addition, companies will often have a house 
style guide used in addition to a general guide like Chicago, and when 
the two guides disagree, the house style guide takes precedence.

Many times, what matters most is internal consistency. If an author is 
aware of competing styles and picks one and remains consistent in its 
use, that's more important than conforming to the style guide someone 
else would choose.

I fear I am the one who set you on a holy crusade against three-dot 
ellipses at the ends of sentences. While Chicago does say to use four, 
and many books out there do, there are also many books that do not. For 
example, I just finished reading Bujold's newest, Paladin of Souls. 
Three-dot ellipses are used consistently throughout, except for on page 
411, where there's an obviously erroneous four-dot ellipsis in the 
middle of a sentence. And I didn't even notice until just now when I 
looked back to see which style was used. Perhaps the reason that many 
fiction books are not following Chicago on this point is that Chicago's 
recommendations for ellipses are focused on in-text quotations from 
other works or other individuals, and not on dialogue or narration. 
Actually, Chicago as a whole was never really meant to be a style guide 
for fiction at all. It was created with nonfiction and scholarly 
writing in mind. There are some recommendations it gives which may not 
really be applicable in a fiction setting. And there are also some 
points which would be quite applicable to fiction upon which Chicago is 
completely silent. Unfortunately, however, there isn't really any other 
style guide as thorough which would be more applicable. But that's one 
of the main reasons for having a supplementary house style guide.

Anyway, whether trailing ellipses have three dots or four is usually 
the sort of thing I would put lower on my priority list than something 
like comma use. I wouldn't remark on it unless there was some 
inconsistency or it was the only pressing concern I had about the 
piece. If there were other comments I had in relation to serious 
questions of plot or characterization, I might save punctuation 
comments for another day entirely, besides a statement like 
"punctuation was inconsistent," since they would be distracting from 
the main thrust of my critique.

For me it's like submissions to a magazine. If I like a story enough to 
publish it, I'll spend enough time to go through with a red pen and 
make the page bleed. If I'm going to reject it, my comments to the 
writer will focus on the reasons. And punctuation is not going to make 
me reject something; if that's the worst aspect of a story, that's 
something that's easily fixed.

Peter


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