The Ellipsis

{title}An ellipsis is a punctuation mark comprised of a series of dots, or points indicating an ommission in the text, an interruption or hesitation. The ellipsis is usually three dots, although there are instances when they appear to be four. Here’s some guidelines for for using ellipses:

Most fonts have a built-in ellipsis character, use the following:

  • Mac: Option-semicolon
  • Windows: ALT 0133
  • XHTML entity: …
  • Character reference: …
  • Unicode reference u2026

There are a few grammatical/typographic rules to follow:

  1. An ellipsis at the end of a sentence is not followed by a full-stop unless it’s inside a quote or the following sentence is functionally complete. Eg. I thought ‘we could go’.
  2. When a complete sentence is ended in an ellipsis, indicating some omitted material, there is a full-stop and the next sentence begins with a capital letter. Eg. Well, I thought. Never mind, it doesn’t matter.
  3. Sentences ending in an exclamation, or question, mark retain their mark after the ellipsis. Eg. Could we?

Quotation marks

{title}Quotation marks, also called inverted commas, are used to wrap quotation. In the UK, it is common practice to use single marks ( ‘ ’ ) except for when there are quotes within quotes, where double marks are used. Whereas in the US it is common practice to use double marks ( “ ” ).

Single marks:

  • Mac: Option+] for left, Shift+Option+] for right
  • PC: ALT 0145 for left, ALT 0146 for right
  • XHTML entity: ‘ for left, ’ for right
  • Character reference:‘ for left, ’ for right
  • Unicode reference:‘ for left, ’ for right

Double marks:

  • Mac: Option+[ for left, Shift+Option+[ for right
  • PC: ALT 0147 for left, ALT 0148 for right
  • XHTML entity: “ for left, ” for right
  • Character reference:“ for left, ” for right
  • Unicode reference:“ for left, ” for right

Quotation marks are the poor fellows which have perhaps suffered the most at the hands of computing and DTP. The mark on your keyboard next to the colon and semi colon is not a quotation mark, it is a prime and double-prime. A prime is the symbol commonly used for feet (12′), a double prime for inches (12′ 6″). Primes can be slanted and can therefore sometimes look like quotation marks, so care needs to be taken to make sure you use the right glyph.

This was an excerpt from Mark Boulton’s The Right Glyph for the Job