In 1963, Norton Juster explained geometry in his illustrated book, The Dot and The Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics. The world of grammar has its own romance between dots (three of them) and a line—a tale about mistaken identity that barely avoids dipping into tragedy. I implore you: beg your own punctuation marks to heed its moral. Leave the tragedy to Shakespeare.
Three Dots and a Line
An Interrupted Elliptical Romance
One day, the ellipsis, her thoughts trailing off, bumped into the sharp end of a dash. Feeling a bit spacey, she apologized at once. “Oh, I’m dreadfully—”
“Em Dash is the name, ma’am.” The dapper line had interrupted, but being the gentleman he was, he politely marked the spot of his offense with a line about the width of an M. “May I be of some assistance?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m at a loss for words. They seemed to be here a second ago.” She blushed. “That often happens, you know. Wherever I find myself, words tend to go missing.”
The dash leaned forward to give her a reassuring hug, but she jumped back, her eyes wide—all three of them—as though he had attacked her. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “I’m from Chicago and we practice social distancing, always putting some space on either side and in between—well, unless it’s someone from my household, of course, like period or comma. They’re allowed to stand beside me. It’s like that old saying—what is it? Oh yes, ‘Three’s company, but two’s a . . .’ Now is that how it goes? Doesn’t seem quite right.”
The dashing Em nodded. “Yes, I see. My mistake—I pegged you as one of those tight-knit AP gals. I was taught to ‘treat an ellipsis as a three-letter word, … with three periods and two spaces’ on either side.[1] As it so happens, I’m from Chicago, too, and we—unlike our AP cousins—like to snuggle up tight with everyone we meet.”
“Well, well, then. From Chicago, too, huh? I hope you don’t think I’m throwing any dots ahead of myself—but would you fancy to, uh, . . . I mean . . . Would you care to go to lunch?”
From that day on, Dash and Ellipsis were often seen together, usually participating in great dialogue. Dash interrupted and encouraged Ellipsis to take pride in her faltering speech. Ellipsis showed Dash how to stand in for quotation marks without feeling like an imposter. They even traded t-shirts on occasion, which created a horrible conundrum for those who knew them only casually.
Unable to determine who was who, superficial grammarians began mixing them up, forcing Ellipsis to carry every break in thought or interruption, though the impoliteness of it all stressed her terribly until her dots began breaking out all over the page, even in first person narration, somewhere she’d never thought she’d be. And the dash, at a loss for why people couldn’t recognize him or his job, often shrank to the size of his cousin En who hangs out with numbers—or even worse, Em fell sometimes into such a depression he could reach across the page only as far a hyphen, a mark wholly unrelated.
Faced with the obliteration of proper punctuation usage everywhere—and for the sake of their joint mental health—the pair agreed to stop seeing one another and begged all caring, conscientious persons with pens or typing pads to recognize them each for who they were and stop conflating them into a single mark.
Ms. Ellipsis has decided she’s fine and dandy standing in where words have fled, even when she loses her train of thought. At least she no longer has to abruptly interrupt people or scramble onstage when a first-person narrator doesn’t know how to go on with the story.
Occasionally Mr. Em Dash pulls out old photos of Ellipsis and wonders what might have been, but mostly, well, he’s just as dapper as ever, adding on extra thoughts, connecting ideas to what came before, and interrupting—politely, of course.
What Ms. Ellipsis Is Doing Now
Signals the omission of words, phrases, lines, or paragraphs from quoted material
Denotes a trailing off for thought or speech
Indicates faltering speech in dialogue
Marks end of quotations deliberately left grammatically incomplete
How Mr. Em Dash Is Currently Employed
Sets off explanatory elements in a sentence, as with parentheses or commas, but especially when an abrupt break in thought occurs
Indicates a sudden break in thought or interruption, especially in dialogue
Connects introductory nouns or series of nouns with the pronoun and explanation that follows
Connects explanatory commentary to the ideas and grammatically complete clauses that come before it
The Chicago and AP Punctuation Clans
Chicago Ellipsis: . . . (space before and after as well as in between each suspension point)
AP Ellipsis: … (space before and after, but three periods put together, or the ellipsis word processor character)
Chicago Em Dash: no space on either side—like this
AP Em Dash: space on either side — like this, but still the full width of the typewriter M character.
Ms. Ellipsis’s Social Rules when Playing with Other Punctuation
If the removed words from a quote create a full sentence to the left of the ellipsis, the period always occurs before the ellipsis. Commas, question marks, and exclamations, however, occur on the side of the ellipsis that accurately shows where the original words occurred:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong. . . . And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries . . ., and if I have all faith, . . . but have not love, I am nothing.” (1 Cor. 13:1–2)