Let me show you how to use an ellipsis when you're quoting. An ellipsis is three spaced periods,
as you can see here, and we use this to show that a little bit of the original text has been skipped
in our quotation. That's very handy for when we want to speed things up or draw attention to
certain parts of the quote and not others. For this demonstration I've used this little poem
by the fictional Thomas Prendergast, and as we start here, we start with a critic making an
observation. So Simon Snapdragon suggests that the poem is less a scientific response based on
careful experimentation and more a personal opinion. What we can do is we can take out
something in the middle here. Okay, so we're going to use our ellipsis. Tthere we are, and it still
makes perfect sense: "less a scientific response and more personal opinion." This allows us to
create a nice contrast between these two elements without getting distracted by the middle of the
quotation, which is less important. Now a lot of people when they start using ellipses they feel
like they have to add it at the beginning and end of every quotation. After all, you've taken it out
of the original fabric of the text and you need to indicate that . . . there's text missing. But you
don't have to do that typically, especially at the beginning. We know that this quote is coming from
somewhere. You don't need to use an ellipsis to say, "hey, I cut it out of a larger text."
However, sometimes if the original sentence continues then you may want to use an ellipsis.
So to indicate that that sentence was not finished, you could add an ellipsis there.
That one's a little bit optional. You'll see some variation, but that's quite common.
In our second example I want to show you how not to do something. In this case we might be tempted
to get rid of part of this quotation (this is a quote from the poem itself), and we might say,
"okay, well I'm just going to reduce this by taking out the bit I've highlighted here. And
then all we would have is "the foulest owl eats mice." Now the problem with that is
that we've changed the grammar of the poem. We've changed what these things refer to.
So be very careful that the grammar still makes sense and that you pay homage to the original
meaning of the words. Be careful what you actually take out. It has to make sense and it has to
be faithful to the integrity of the text. In our third example here, we've used a block quotation
and we've quoted poetry. When you do this, when you skip one or more lines in a poem,
what you can do in a block quote like this is use an entire line of periods. You kind of line it up
with the average length of the other lines and you just put all these periods here. Sometimes
what happens is that the punctuation just before it may need to change. In this case, the colon
doesn't make much sense anymore, because what the colon introduces here we've actually skipped.
So you could leave the colon out. You could also add an ellipsis right after to indicate
that you have left something out. But I probably wouldn't do that. I would just leave the colon
out, as the colon is no longer necessary, but those are tricky situations and and I
would leave that up to you. I think our last example is a longer block quotation. Now,
there's already an ellipsis in the original here, so we have to be a little bit careful, because
if we add our own ellipses we'll have to make a distinction, and I'll show you in a second how
to do that. But first let's look at a couple of examples of how we can skip stuff. In the first
sentence--here we could skip something where it says "a profound meditation on ..." And then we
can actually skip all this stuff here. It's kind of a wordy way of describing the essential bit
of the owl. So I'm just going to skip this and I think the integrity of the text is still
guarded here or kept. So that's good. Now the next thing I'm going to do is skip an entire sentence.
This next sentence--I don't think we really need. The quotation will still make sense without it.
And here's our ellipsis. But notice that something else has happened. We now have four periods and
that's because the previous sentence ended and we need a period at the end of that sentence.
What you can see then is that sometimes you're going to have four periods for an ellipsis
when you're skipping one or more sentences like this. The last thing to do is to make sure that
we indicate that the last ellipsis here is in the original. We'll just write something like
"last ellipsis in original." There we go. You could change the wording too,
as long as you kind of indicate what's going on. Or the other option is you could put your own
ellipses in square brackets. So to indicate that these are your own you could use square brackets
around it, but you really have to choose. Don't do both because that's a bit redundant. Pick one
of the two options. Hopefully that teaches you how to use an ellipsis effectively. And I think you'll
find a very useful tool for chopping up quotations a bit so that we can focus on the essential parts!