Free, easy to understand English
grammar and writing tutorial lessons

Click for Main Topic List

Punctuation

The period or full stop

The comma

Connecting clauses

Lists in a sentence

Separating lists of adjectives

Parenthetical phrases

Introductory phrases

Quotation marks

Using single quotation marks

The exclamation mark or exclamation point

The question mark

The colon

When to capitalise after a colon

The semicolon

The apostrophe

Making words plural using apostrophes

The hyphen

Dividing words at the end of a line

Using hyphens to create compound numbers

Using hyphens to avoid confusion

Using hyphens to join words together to form adjectival phrases

Using hyphens with prefixes

Using hyphens for position descriptions

The em and en dash

Parentheses

Brackets

The forward slash

To indicate choice between multiple options

For dates

Fractions

The ellipsis or dot dot dot

The ellipsis or dot dot dot

The ellipsis has a few uses in English. When you want to quote something, but don’t want to write the entire quote, you can use an ellipsis to fill in the gaps. Say the original quote was this:

"Tyrannosaurus Rex, a massive carnivorous dinosaur from the late Cretaceous period, is the favourite of most people."

If I’m just trying to get across the point that T-Rex is a popular dinosaur, I can selectively quote just the relevant bits of the sentence, and use an ellipsis to indicate where there are bits missing:

"Tyrannosaurus Rex ... is the favourite of most people."

When you use an ellipsis to replace missing bits in the middle of a quote, one option is to put a space on either side of the ellipsis. However, many people choose not to put spaces there.

"Tyrannosaurus Rex...is the favourite of most people."

When you leave out the words at the end of a quote, you can use an ellipsis to indicate they are missing. But you also need to indicate the end of the sentence with a period. Whack in a space, put the ellipsis in, whack in another space, and then put the period:

"John Lagarzia was a man of great understanding ... ."

Because this doesn’t look too good, it is also acceptable (in Australia at least) to ditch the space and period and count the last dot in the ellipsis as the full stop:

"John Lagarzia was a man of great understanding ..."

If you’re leaving out words at the start of quote, you only need to use an ellipsis if the part of the quote you’re using doesn’t fit nicely into the rest of your sentence. Remember that quotes come in two varieties - direct, using quotation marks, and indirect, using ‘he said’, ‘she said’, or ‘they said’.

Recently, he said that dinosaurs were cold blooded ... due to their huge size.

The first part of the sentence contains my own words. The second part after the ellipsis is the last part of a quote by someone. Since the quote fragment fits nicely into the flow of the sentence, I can get rid of the ellipsis:

Recently, he said that dinosaurs were cold blooded due to their huge size.

This is the end of the chapter. Click here to return to the main topic list