Okay, we're going to talk about ellipses.
And "ellipses" [is] spelled with a couple of l's, and a couple of s's as well.
[The] singular would be "ellipsis," so one "ellipsis."
This refers to three dots, that we use for a couple of purposes.
And these dots are usually spaced, so put some spaces in between them to make them look
a little bit more elegant.
And you can see the first of these uses at the end of this passage.
So what we've done here is we've added some dots to show that we're trailing off, and
we can add some suspense or mystery or drama this way.
So it says "sharks had started circling the island, dot dot dot.
Obviously a bit forced, but I think you can see the point of that in creative fiction.
The other use of the ellipsis, which is the one we're going to talk about in this video,
has to do with skipping passages when you quote from a text.
So let's say that we want to ... quote something from this passage, and we'll start with "We
were shipwrecked," and then we want to jump ahead to "I had brought my favourite book,"
so we want to quote those two pieces."
Well, in the middle, so where we get to "shipwrecked," and we'll focus just on the middle passage
here, we're going to write, "shipwrecked . . ." and then we're going to add a connecting word,
because often it doesn't quite make sense syntactically, so we're going to say "shipwrecked
... [but] I had brought my favourite book," and you can see there that we've nicely connected
this, and the square brackets show that the word "but" is my word, and is not part of
the original passage.
Now, in the past, if you were to follow the MLA guidelines, for instance, they would suggest,
or they used to suggest, that you actually put some square brackets around the ellipsis
as well, just to show that, you know, this is not in the original text, but you've added
the ellipsis.
Nowadays you can basically do without that.
You don't have to add those square brackets.
Next thing to notice is that sometimes you may want to jump from the end of a sentence,
or even from the middle of a sentence, but when your quotation keeps going it's a new
sentence syntactically.
Well, in that case you actually need four periods.
So let's say that you write, "We were shipwrecked," and you could even end it there if you wanted
to, but let's say you go all the way to "1792."
And then you keep going with "Fortunately, I had brought my favourite book."
So, you would get to "1792" and the sentence clearly ends there.
And then you add three more spaced periods, the ellipsis, and then you would keep going
with "Fortunately," and so on.
So, you can see here that we've actually ended up with four periods, because one has to indicate
where the end of the sentence is.
And I think that's fairly natural, so if your sentence ends and you keep going further along
the line, well, you're going to have one extra period.
Another thing to notice is that if you were to quote this passage that ends with the ellipsis
here.
(Actually, let's just go to the other side here).
You may want to indicate that that ellipsis is not your ellipsis, but was part of the
original passage.
So let's pretend that this passage is on page 7.
Then what you can do in your citation is you add a semi-colon, and then you might say something
like"ellipsis in the original," and the wording is somewhat up to you.
And obviously it's hard to fit it all on one line here, because we have to squeeze it into
the screen, but you would make sure it's all on the same line.
So that's pretty much it for using the ellipsis.
We're going to talk about one more thing, which is what you can do when you're quoting
poetry.
Okay, so let's say that you're quoting from the New Zealand anthem here, and you don't
want to quote all of it.
Well, often what you can do is you can just stick the ellipsis in, as we have talked [about]
before, but sometimes if you have a block quotation, and you're skipping multiple lines,
then you can do something a little bit different.
So let's say that you want to quote three lines here and the final line, but you don't
need all the stuff in between.
Well, you would start your quotation.
So let's just pretend this is text.
Here is another line ... third line ... and then what you're skipping is indicated by
these dots that go across your screen.
Instead of having just three you have multiple dots, and you keep on going, and often what
people do is they don't go all the way to the end of the page, but you can sort of line
it up with the end of where your lines of verse end.
And then the final line here is the one we add at the end.
And obviously a citation would follow afterwards.
So, in a block quotation, in other words, where the lines are underneath each other,
and you want to show that at least one line (one complete line) has been left out, you
can use these dots all the way across to show where that has happened.
That's it for the ellipsis.
I hope you found this useful, and I think you will because when you're quoting it just
allows you to make your quotations more compact, to skip to exactly what you need, and I think
your reader will appreciate that--not having to read through this really long quotation.