#ellipses

[catfindr]

[stellarblitz]

Me proofreading my writing

[cryptidseye]

Sorry for the multiple posts in the past few hours BUT I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS.

Anyway, I was thinking abt trans boy dipper the other day and some other post somewhere (maybe on tumblr? Pinterest? I don't know........) made me realise how hellish it would actually be to like be in Mabel's body bc like. He can't just....... cut her hair to be more masculine and he can't just dress more masculine in her body without confusing the fuck out of people???? What a wild ride

And I genuinely cannot watch the clip of him thinking that one lady was implying he wasn't a guy bc she said "mail man" and tearing up/crying over it BECAUSE IT MAKES ME SAD AND MY HEART HURTS can he just be happy plz.

[jhsharman]

"Merry Go Round"

2 period ellipses fixed to 3, realize there is a pause after "my".

The story opens with Reggie pursuing Betty, who is pursuing Archie, who is pursuing Veronica, who is pursuing Alex, who is with Jane. Jane leaves Alex for Reggie as Veronica decides to settle for Archie and Archie decided he has to settle for Betty and Betty decided she has to settle for Reggie with Alex now going after Veronica. Jughead is the dispassionate narrator.

One problem is that Jane does go for Reggie when he approaches, so for this loop ending to work Jane would have to decide to go back after Alex... The redirected circle was not completed.

[aranarumei]

how do people format ellipses?

hey everyone kiri here. I've been reading the chicago manual of style instead of writing fic again. Every time i do this I'm always shaken by the fact that the way the Chicago style and the AP style of formatting ellipses both feel So Wrong (for those wondering, AP stands for associated press and thus deals with newswriting, whereas chicago gets used in book publishing and like… everything else too sometimes)

Oh, look! I just used an ellipsis. This is a perfect segue to talk about how I format things. And also to add a "keep reading" because I'm not good at conciseness

the above usage of an ellipsis is how I've always done mine. The three periods that auto-correct into a single "ellipsis" character in most word processors gets places right after a word, and I add a space afterwards. If I'm starting with an ellipsis, though, that usage looks weird. "… This doesn't feel too right to me." I adapt it into this: "…This fits my aesthetic preference." For punctuation, the question mark comes right after…? which, now that I look at it, feels weirdly tight compared to the spacing I use.

My dim recollections of fic seem to have ellipses follow either my pattern or this pattern, where spaces have been entirely eliminated. So an ellipsis is then formatted…like so. I would have to do a proper survey of everything I've read fic-wise to see if this is indeed the case, but like... isn't it pretty wild that the chicago and AP style of formatting follow neither convention?

Okay. I was about to discuss the Chicago style and then spent a half an hour of reading to find that there's no example of starting sentences with an ellipsis. This is because the Chicago manual of style is primarily meant for publishing nonfiction, and thus deals with ellipses as they're used in the function of quoting stuff, not to represent faltering speech like in fiction. Fiction publishing style is a bit looser, and a lot of publishing places have their own house style that's followed (as far as I can tell, they still lean pretty close to Chicago, though!)

Anyways, the ellipsis in Chicago style is three periods, separated by non-breaking spaces. The non-breaking spaces means that the ellipsis won't be split over one line, so the ellipsis is essentially treated like a word and not like three separate periods. Like a word, there's spaces on each side, like . . . this. The usage of non-breaking spaces is so uncommon that the manual actually advises to use the traditional ellipsis character we see, like … this and let an editor find and replace that stuff. By the way, that there, with the normal ellipsis Word and other word processor programs will auto-format for you? That's the AP style.

For formatting ellipses differences, though, you can't always treat it like just a word. When you're dealing with a question mark . . . ? You would leave a space afterwards. The same is true for a period or a comma, but if you were ending a dialogue you would indeed cut the space at the end. "Like so . . ." For faltering speech it works rather like an em dash, which used to be the recommended method of formatting faltering speech, I believe.

That's all of my random musings for today. I don't know if any of these non-breaking spaces or ellipsis characters were actually preserved in uh the tumblr editor, so let's see about that one. I copy pasted the ellipses in from Word but the rest was written straight into the tumblr editor which is why you're looking at these lovely straight and uncurled quotes. I'm also sure I've gotten some detail wrong here so feel free to correct me. Finally, if I were to one day decide to change to the Chicago style of ellipses, I assume you'd begin dialogue ". . . Like so."

[art-of-mathematics]

Today I found a good video about merging tubes with different angles, ellipses, phase shift of sine waves, featuring sculptures by Frank Smullin.

This video is exceptionally comprehensive.

[Shared by hardm.ix on instagram: Text says: "A little more on the analytic constructivist sculpture of Frank Smullin, a professor of mine at Duke University who combined art and engineering in a way that reminded me a little of Kenneth Snelson and Tensegrity or Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes."]

[problemnyatic]

inspired by my deltarune shitpost, I noticed I use both two and three dot ellipses in the dialogue, and that the roles they serve grammatically are similar but not usually interchangeable. The two dot ellipsis is like the comma to the three-dot's period. This is all just loose observation on my part, and hardly academically rigorous or speaking to any kind of hard-and-fast rule. I'm just in it for love of the game u feel?

Anyways, the three-dot ellipsis tends to represent a specific lack of information, either in the form of a removed piece of quoted dialogue, or a more complete thought that drifted off partway through. The two-dot ellipsis, in contrast, almost seems to stand in for unknown information on the speaker's part, acting to connect two related but moderately disconjunct ideas in an attempt to kind of verbally sketch one's way towards the point they're grasping at while their brain fumbles for the correct verbiage or conceptual missing link. It patches over and connects incomplete thoughts, whereas the three-dot seems to appear where a more complete thought has been truncated in some way.

The two-dot is lighter-weight, suggestive of a speaker who is unwilling to fully stop their thought despite needing to split a considerably higher degree of attention between forming ideas and forming sentences than normal, or otherwise struggling to form said thoughts into a more cogent dialogue.

also, it's great for trailing off from an already complete thought, once again representing a void where the three-dot ellipsis usually stands for missing substance. At least in my neck of the online written dialect.

I heart you two dot ellipsis.. <3

[demonboyhalo]

Foolish, to Ranboo: You're kinda spooky too. You have, like, 3 eyeballs on each side...What gems are on your crown? Because you have these red and green ones and it makes me think...you might have 8 eyes.

alright whose drawing biblical horror eldritch ranboo based off this