Oh, I hate to go all Grammar Witch on everybody on a Saturday and everything, but something has gotten so far out of control that I'm afraid we're at an epidemic. What's so dire? I'll tell you. Lately, it appears to have come into fashion among some circles to replace all punctuation with ellipses.
Did I just get a 'huh?' Okay. It goes something like this:
I'm in a thoughtful mood today... Not sure why... Maybe it's the General Foods International Coffee I'm drinking... French Vanilla Cappuccino... Tasty...
See what I did there? Any possible punctuation, especially periods, and I just added two more dots, effectively turning my full-stop sentence enders into rolling, North Philadelphia stops. If you read the passage above aloud, it takes on kind of a mushy, NPR Ladies quality. That's the best case. It's not that important of a passage. It's about being in a thoughtful mood and drinking an International Coffee.
When used liberally all over the place in an email, status update, note, or other communique, it makes the writer look wishy-washy, hesitant, gutless and nutless. I cannot think of one person who, in real life, would want to be seen as wishy-washy, hesitant, gutless or nutless, so why has it become so cool to replace any and all other punctuation with these damn ellipses? Have people really become as afraid as they look to just pinch off the end of the sentence?
I understand that one reason might be because people are trying to convey a mood of thoughtfulness and musing. It's okay to use an ellipsis here and there to do just that, but when it's every sentence just fading off into three or four dots at the "end," the dots start to draw attention away from the musing and to themselves. They're distracting in their rambling.
I suspect that in certain kinds of messages, there's a need to convey something that could be construed as unpleasant to the message's target, so instead of just coming out with it, the message writer gets all passive-aggressive in hopes of padding the brunt of their message with lots of ellipses, so maybe the reader understands how much the writer really didn't want to have to write a criticism or a suggestion or whatever. The thing to remember in this case is that "dots do not equal diplomacy."
The least charitable part of me thinks people just don't know better. Now, am I always grammatically correct? Not by a mile. I find myself starting sentences with "And" way too much. I lean heavily on cliche sometimes. I dangle participles and splice commas. If I'm not Queen of the Run-On Sentence, I'm at least a duchess, or maybe a baroness. Sometimes, I break the rules of grammar for effect. Sometimes, it's just plain sloppiness. I admit that. However, I try not to let any one grammatical infraction happen over and over on a page, paragraph, or sentence so as to let it call attention to itself and make itself a nuisance.
Truly, as Carole Maso said, you need to know the rules before you can break them, and with the amount of ellipses as periods, commas, semicolons, and such that I see on a daily basis, I think people just don't know the rules. When CAN you use ellipses correctly?
It's okay, correct even, to use ellipses at the end of a sentence, ONCE IN A WHILE, to convey kind of a trailing off of your train of thought, to convey musing or rambling. The emphasis on ONCE IN A WHILE cannot be highlighted enough. Here, let me try: IT'S OKAY TO USE ELLIPSES SPARINGLY IN THIS MANNER!
If you're quoting a passage and need to shorten it up, take out the bits you think are redundant, insert a set of ellipses to show that you removed something, and sew it up. Don't change the meaning of the original quote, though. This is a tricky line to walk. With clever enough trimming, you can decontextualize just about anything and twist it to whatever purpose you wish. Know your power, wield it correctly and judiciously.
When you're writing out the number such as pi, that good ol' decimal that goes on forever. All I remember is 3.14... That shows there's more to the story than what I'm taking the time to write, because sure as sugar, as soon as I wrote out pi to the fourteenth decimal place or whatever on that geometry quiz in the tenth grade, I went to the girls' room, had a whiz, and forgot all the numbers past the four, which is all you really need to figure out the area of a circle, at least for my purposes.
I use ellipses a lot when I type the captions for Zoe's pictures on Facebook, but I use them to indicate that someone out of the frame is "talking" to her. You don't "hear" what the other person is saying, only Zoe's reaction to them, thus, the ellipses. I've excised half the conversation, but I want to show the reader that Zoe's interacting with someone they don't see. I'm not just using the ellipses as my exclusive form of punctuation.
I'm not an island on this one. There's an excellent resource called Grammar Girl. Find her at http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ when you're in a grammatical pinch. I had to consult her to find out if it's ever okay to use ellipses at the end of a sentence. She'll back me up on the whole sparingly thing.
And no, I'm not Grammar Girl. I wish! Alas, I'm just me. I'm me, but it makes me some kind of Grammar Meanie when I see ellipses dotting up an email or a status update like some kind of herpaderp Morse Code that's all dot, no dash. I don't expect everyone to have perfect grammar. Honestly, I don't WANT everyone to have perfect grammar, because then what would I have to be smug about? I'm not good at sports! I'm not particularly handy or good in emergencies. But I DO know grammar.
Maybe just knock it off with all the fecking ellipses for a while, and do well enough with your grammar to keep yourselves under my radar for a while, then come out with a whopper of a mistake, so I can help you fix it and then I can feel important and good about myself for a little while. Does that sound okay? Okay. I promise tomorrow, I won't get all Grammar Witchy on you. It's the weekend, after all.
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