If you're writing for yourself, you can do whatever makes sense to you, as long as you're consistent with it.

Personally I do this:

Ellipses are for when someone's speech trails off (for sudden interruptions, I use an em-dash).
I use the Unicode character "…", with no space before, and one space after.

I write everything in plaintext, then let the software (in my case, pandoc) do the conversion to nice-looking Unicode characters. Any WYSIWYG word processor worth their sal— I mean, bytes, can smarten punctuation on the fly, or let you insert special characters.

I've seen some old texts on Project Gutenberg that put spaces between dots, or even use more than three dots, such as (made-up example):

Yes, do that . . . . please.

Also, in Japanese media, using long runs of dots is common to indicate pauses.

If you're writing to get published, take a look at the style guide that your editor uses.

For example, the Chicago Manual Of Style prefers three dots, and requires non-breaking spaces to be put between them (but allows the single-character Unicode version too), while New Hart's Rules prefer the single-character (source: www.liminalpages.com/ellipsis-spaces-dots).
But ultimately, (ibid.)

[B]oth are correct!

And, in regards to spacing before/after the ellipsis, (ibid.)

Should there be a space before and after the ellipsis, though … like
this? Or should there be no space…like this? Again, it’s a style
decision. Either is fine, as long as you’re consistent.

Being consistent is key, so that you make your editor's life easier, and they can replace all occurrences of ellipses with a single command.

I use no space before the ellipses, so that they don't get broken apart, and you end up with just ellipses at the beginning of the line -- you always have at least one word preceding them -- and one space after, for consistency with commas and periods.

And in regards to spacing if you use separate dots (ibid.):

Keep in mind, too, that it’s important the dots always appear on the
same line, so make sure you’re either using a single glyph or
non-breaking spaces.

Again, non-breaking spaces are a pain in WYSIWYG editors (it's not immediately apparent they're different than normal spaces), so I just prefer the single-character ellipsis.

---

(0)

Login to post a comment!