Note: When used within a sentence, place a space before the first period and after the last period of ellipses. I have a weathered copy of that photograph. Partial quotation using a closed ellipsis: I have a weathered copy of that photograph in my own personal collection. Use a 4-period (closed) ellipsis at the end of a partial quote that is nonetheless a complete grammatical sentence (thus including a period at the end of a 3-period ellipsis).

The veterinarian spoke softly, 'The poor horse is. Use ellipses to indicate a pause, hesitation, or unfinished thought. The absurdity of the situation makes me ponder Hamlet's query 'whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer. Use ellipses when material has been omitted from a direct (word-for-word) quotation, whether the omission is a word, phrase, or several sentences. Wordsworth's lines, 'There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparell'd in celestial light,' begin one of his most beautiful poems.Įllipses are made up of three periods with spaces between them (.) and are used to indicate that material is missing within a sentence or passage.ġ. Use a slash to indicate the division between lines of poetry quoted within a sentence. I am acting as the secretary/treasurer/social chairman since there are only two of us on the board.Ģ. Do not use a space before or after the slash.Ĭatherine is taking the course pass/fail. Use a slash to indicate that a choice can be made between paired or multiple terms. The slash (/) is used to show a division between paired terms or between lines of poetry.ġ. Do not include a period or comma after the dash. Use a dash to indicate an abruptly unfinished thought or remark. Learning the mechanics–the complex, detailed structural components–of the English language is very difficult because the rules are often so inconsistent.ģ. (An appositive is a noun or noun phrase that immediately follows and renames a noun or pronoun and is usually surrounded by commas.) Use a dash to set off appositives that contain commas. The dash is intended to emphasize supplemental information, whereas parentheses tend to understate it.Ģ.

Note: Although they can be used in similar situations, the dash and parentheses serve slightly different purposes.

His feelings for Gwendolyn–he is madly in love with her–will never change. Three of the people in my class–Tom, Dick, and Harry–refused to join the demonstration. Only one person wears that perfume–my mother. Use a dash to set off an interruption that is closely relevant to the sentence but not grammatically part of it, such as a list, illustration, restatement, summary, shift in thought or tone, or dramatic point. The word-processing program may form this automatically when two hyphens are typed together.ġ. Some word-processing programs have a mark called an em-dash (longer than a hyphen), which can be used with no space before or after it. Do not put a space before or after the dash. When typing, use two hyphens together without spaces to form a dash. Sometimes confused with the hyphen, a dash comes between words as a form of division, whereas a hyphen generally joins words or parts of words to indicate a connection.

The dash (–) is used to set off additional material within a sentence, often in order to emphasize it, to set off appositives that contain commas, or to indicate missing words. The dash, slash, ellipses, and brackets are marks that serve specific purposes as indicated below.

Poems like the dash