How to Use an Ellipsis

People often ask how to use ellipses, those little dot-dot-dots you often see in email messages. For example, Mitra from Michigan asked, "When is it appropriate to use '...' in writing? People use it all the time, and it seems like a way to make your writing more informal and conversational, as if you were pausing. Can you also use [the dot-dot-dot] for formal writing?"

The answer is that you can use ellipses in formal writing in other ways, and you can occasionally use an ellipsis as Mitra described in his email, but you shouldn't overdo it.

Using an ellipsis to show an omission

In formal writing, the most common way to use an ellipsis is to show that you’ve omitted words. For example, if you're quoting someone and you want to shorten the quotation, you use ellipses to indicate where you've dropped words or sentences.

Here's a quote from the book "Our Mutual Friend" by Charles Dickens: "I cannot help it; reason has nothing to do with it; I love her against reason."

Now far be it from me to edit Dickens, but if I were a journalist under a tight word limit looking at that quotation, I'd be tempted to shorten it to this: "I cannot help it . . . I love her against reason." That middle part—“reason has nothing to do with it"—seems redundant, and taking it out doesn't change the meaning. Dot-dot-dot and it's gone, which saves seven words. Clearly, literature and journalism are not the same thing.

Here’s another example from a "Rolling Stone" review of the movie "The Green Knight": "Like all good medieval dramas, it has its share of hallucinogenic weirdness—talking foxes, loping giants, ghostly maidens—and ends not with a bang but with a magnificently mournful sigh."

If I wanted to quote the review, and I had limited space, I could use an ellipsis to shorten the quotation by omitting the examples about foxes, giant, and maidens, and write, "Like all good medieval dramas, it has its share of hallucinogenic weirdness . . . and ends not with a bang but with a magnificently mournful sigh."

Don’t use ellipses to change the meaning of a quotation

It’s wrong to use an ellipsis to make even a subtle change to the meaning of a quotation.

Integrity is essential when using ellipses this way. It's acceptable to tighten a long quotation by omitting unnecessary words, but it's important that you don't change the meaning. For example, in the "Green Knight"...

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