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Ellipses...

w1rebaby

21:19 / 20.07.02

I've noticed a horrible tendency on my part to use ellipses. Either as a way of turning utterly banal statements into "ironic jokes", or basically, you know...

...from being too lazy to finish a sentence.

I'm going to stop using ellipses at once. A sentence without ellipsis is like a day without wine - good for me. And I urge you to do the same. Together we can beat this menace...

fuck

Knight's Move

21:23 / 20.07.02

I know what you mean, I always find myself using commas and ellipses and question marks rather than full stops or exclamation marks. I think it's because I often write like I speak and when I speak I hate to be definite. I always shy away from definitive statements so I can retract or alter what I said later to avoid looking like a fool. An unfortunate obsolete (thankfully) defense mechanism from school to avoid ridicule. Well more ridicule. Also I like telling stories and it's always more fun when the people listening run into what your suggesting rather than you saying it out loud.

I do do it a lot though...

Shit.

Sax

21:27 / 20.07.02

Ellipses are the wasp's nipples, guys. They're an invitation to continue the conversation, rather than an arrogant "and that's what I think. Debate over".

Tezcatlipoca

21:33 / 20.07.02

I do the same sort of thing. Much like my mode of speech, I prefer to craft a fairly open conversational suggestion, rather than a definite statement. I'm also waaaaayy too free with my hyphens, commas, and other marks. My partner hates it. My agent loves it.

Knight's Move

21:36 / 20.07.02

I know what you mean. My friend's love listening to my stories. Simple questions like "How was the trip down?" become sprawling epics involving characters from way back, shared experiences, the way I have to explain many other things to justify why a certain event was eerily synchronous, the way I lose the point completely and have to get dragged back.

Well, they often like it but they do have to rein it in everynow and again.

Well, always. The phrase 'long story short' is rarely in my vocabulary...

Ooops, there I go again.

w1rebaby

22:42 / 20.07.02

Bah, enough of this poofy ellipsis nonsense. I'm going to write in short direct sentences from now on. Without adverbs. Like Hemingway. Or James Ellroy. Yes.

Warewullf

22:58 / 20.07.02

*channeling Jade*

"Wot's an ellipse? Isn't that a wonky circle??"

Trijhaos

23:47 / 20.07.02

For some strange reason, I thought this was going to be a thread about those funny looking circly things.

I don't think ellipses are bad necessarily, if they're used properly, but if you use them in place of normal punctuation all the time, you may have a problem. I've seen people stick ellipses in the middle of paragrahs for no odd reason....so....their...pararaphs.....look...like....this.... It drives me crazy. Why press the '.' that many times. Just use one punctuation mark at the end of the sentence instead of having '......' all over the place.

Murray Hamhandler

02:01 / 21.07.02

Ellipses are fantabuloso. I can't get enough of them, really. I guess they maybe best reflect my chosen form of verbal pause. Some people go w/the "uh, uh, uh" bit when they're grasping for the next bit of their sentence, some repeat the last word over and over to bridge the hitch. Me, I just...stop, until my tongue catches up w/my brain. And I also have a tendency to trail off...

Persephone

02:43 / 21.07.02

I use ellipses --and dashes-- because, embarassingly, I have a tic about commas. I can't stand a sentence to be broken into three, with commas. So... if I find myself breaking a sentence into three, then I replace one of the commas with ellipses.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

07:04 / 21.07.02

I like ellipses, even though I had a tendancy to horridly overuse them in my early writing. They act as a pause, or a way to show that the writer is thinking about what is is about the write.

There is a silent sort of pausing in speaking that is impossible to duplicate in writing without them.

So let's all huggle ellipses.

Cat Chant

07:36 / 21.07.02

I've just finished copy-editing an article on how ellipses are queer, ruinous of the heteronormativity of the law, and constitute a subversive 'expression' of lesbian sexual activity (I think this is quite an old argument, at least about the lesbian stuff). Go figure.

/, of course, is another gay piece of punctuation. ! looks like an erect penis, so is to be avoided, unless you like that sort of thing. : is pretty progressive, I think, according to Avital Ronell & Heidegger. It's probably just full stops that are bad, though Derrida says something about commas: I think that they're a bit sneaky and not to be trusted.

rizla mission

09:06 / 21.07.02

Just about all of by Barbelith posts have at least one ellipse in them. I feel no shame .. they just sort of mark the boundaries between different thoughts and bunchs of words that you can't be bothered to string together into coherent sentences .. and, as previously pointed out, stuck at the end of sentences/posts instead of full stops, they suggest a continuation, that what has just been written is incomplete and subject to improvement (which, in my case, it almost always is)..

ELLIPSES = the punctuation of freedom!

Shortfatdyke

09:28 / 21.07.02

you mean dotdotdots have a proper name? wow, i learn something new every day on barbelith! a bit shameful, really, since i'm supposed to be a writer, but i never learned anything like that at school. like sax, i use them to invite other comments, but i'd certainly like to hear more about what deva was saying about them being an expression of lesbian sexual activity.

i use ellipses a lot, here and in letters, but rarely in stories. i do love a comma, myself, because it makes me feel like i'm being tripped up and made to slow down or pause for breath in a sentence. semi colons are like having a little hurdle to clamber over, but at work they keep putting initial caps on things that Don't Really Warrant Them, and it pisses me off big-time.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

11:20 / 21.07.02

I really am the big ellipse fairy. Every post of mine has them in, or if they don't it's because I've actually gone and deleted them after I typed them...
I don't know why. I guess sometimes I use it like an alternative question mark, like (blah)... what do you think of this? And sometimes it's just to leave a pause before you hopefully get the joke in whatever I just said.

The Return Of Rothkoid

05:23 / 22.07.02

SFD: yep. But it's not just three dots. Putting in three full stops is typographically different to an ellipse. ... versus …

And they are not lazy and evil, goddamnit…

(though to be frank, I tend to just use three dots on the PC, as it's more difficult than banging out an ellipsis mark on the mac...)

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