An ellipsis (or plural ellipses) is
basically a set of three spaced periods,
and we use these to skip over a part of
a quotation. So it's a really handy tool
to have, but we do want to make sure that
we use it properly. To explain how to
use an ellipsis properly, we'll have a
look at this little poem here, and then
we'll talk about how we can incorporate
bits of it as well (as some critical
opinion about it) in our own writing. So
this poem, by the fictional Thomas
Prendergast, goes: "The foulest of the
fowl / has got to be the owl: / The owl eats
mice, / It even tastes them twice! / Want to
see? Go stand beneath its tree." Alright,
so we have our first
quotation here
with an ellipsis in it, and you can see
that our ellipsis skips a little bit of
this quotation. So we have "the foulest,"
and then we have "the owl eats mice." So we
have this little bit here as well.
But there is a problem with this, because if
we put the ellipsis here then even
though syntactically it still makes
sense (it's still a complete sentence)
it's not really being fair to the
original text. We've changed the meaning.
In the original text, every owl is said to
eat mice but here it's the foulest owl
that eats mice. And so we have to be very
careful when we quote from a text that
we don't actually change the meaning by
using ellipses. So this one is definitely
incorrect, although some features of it
are on the right track. For instance,
if we use an ellipsis in dealing with
poetry and we get to the end of a line
(so we're skipping from one line to a
different one), we don't have to use this
/ that we typically use in separating
different lines of poetry -- at least in
these kind of shorter quotations that
are just two or three lines long. Now, if
we have a longer quotation (so a block
quotation) and we skip an entire line,
then what you can do is you can add this
set of periods all the way across.
In fact, if you're following the MLA
guidelines, I think they would suggest
that you keep going and going and going,
all the way to the end of
the line, but I think that looks a little
bit ugly and I would be completely fine
with just sort of matching it up with
the end of the other lines by and large.
Now, if you look at the rest of this
quotation, you can see that it does make
sense. So we have "Prendergast suggests
that nature should be experienced, not
just read about" and then we have "The
foulest of the fowl has got to be the owl /
Want to see? / Go stand beneath its tree."
And we can take out those middle lines
then because the rest of it still makes
sense, and that's really what you want to
watch out for. Now there is this colon
here as well, and you can see here that
the colon isn't strictly necessary,
and maybe the syntax has changed, so we
could perhaps get rid of that as well --
we could drop the colon. And because
we have all of these
periods here already, it's
probably fine just not to add extra
periods over here. You know, that looks
a little bit funny, so in this case I
think I would probably just take the
colon off and put the periods here.
As you can see then, there are lots of
tricky situations like that where you
can't be quite sure sometimes what the
right thing is to do, but on the whole we
just want to make sure that we use
periods to show where we have omitted
information. It used to be the case
actually that these periods were in
square brackets. The MLA guidelines
suggest that you use square brackets to
really show that any periods or any
addition to the quotation is your own.
That's no longer necessary, but
it can now happen that you're quoting
and the quotation itself already has an
ellipsis too, and that gets a little bit
tricky. What you can do then -- let's say
the the original quotation has some dots --
you can actually add a little note to
your citation at the end. You could say
something like
"first ellipsis in the original"
or "is original" -- or, you know, whatever kind
of phrase you think would clarify that
the one ellipsis is not yours and the
other one is. That's just one
suggestion to kind of work around this
problem. Then we have dealing with prose
quotations, and we have a fairly long
critical passage here. Obviously this is
too long for just a regular quote -- it
should be a block quote -- but we're going
to work with it anyway, and it will
probably change. Now, if we take this
first little bit here, the first sentence ...
we're just going to copy this and we'll
paste it further down ...
it's fairly easy to take some stuff out.
So we write: As Peter Nimrod writes,
"Thomas Prendergast's poem 'The Owl ...'"
Well, maybe we want
to take out this whole middle piece
because it's a bit of a digression and
it doesn't pertain to our point. Then we
can use an ellipsis, and we'll make sure
that our periods are spaced, and now you
can see that the syntax follows very
nicely here. So "Thomas Prendergast's poem ...
remains a profound meditation" -- you can
see that even though we took stuff out
it still flows nice and smoothly. At the
end, of course, we want to make sure we
add our citation back in. We'll do
that for a moment. If we
want to quote something from this
passage, and we want to skip more than
just a part of one sentence, we need to
make sure that we add an extra period,
and I'll show you how that works.
Actually we'll just do it right here ...
So let's take out this whole middle piece
here, and this whole part is sort of
critical opinion (kind of nonsensical)
... that deals with
some dispute that various critics have,
and maybe it's not relevant to what
we're saying, so we're going to skip over
it. What you can see now is that because
this sentence ends, here we actually have
an extra period. We have a period for the
end of the sentence, and then we have our
three
periods (our ellipses) to show that we
have skipped over a passage.
That's the difference between these two
examples. The one has just three and the
other one has four, and that's because we
ended a sentence there. Just something to
watch out for. But on the whole using the
ellipsis is I think fairly
straightforward. You just need to make
sure that what you skip ... or
the stuff that's left after you skip a
passage still make sense together,
that you respect the integrity of
the original thought, and that your new
quotation doesn't change the meaning.