Punctuation tip: Ellipsis vs. em dash, Part I

Reader Pam suggested this topic (pardon the tardiness) quite some time ago: When is the ellipsis preferable to the em dash, or vice versa?

Pam has a better reason for wondering than the average person. She is an audio transcriptionist. Her job requires that she type precisely what the voices in her files say, but punctuation is a notoriously tricky thing to "hear." Choosing the right mark requires not just careful listening but interpretation.

For those of us who are not transcriptionists, though, the question is still relevant. We make certain implications about the topics at hand when we choose one mark or the other. Is your punctuation doing what you intend it to do?

Ellipsis
The ellipsis (…) is used to show that a thought has been left incomplete. It often shows up when a person's speech wanders from one subject or association to another in a disjointed manner. It suggests a certain hesitation or uncertainty. In print, the ellipsis sometimes has the effect of encouraging the reader to mentally fill in the blank himself, essentially prodding him to make an assumption about the speaker's real meaning.

Crazy dream…driving a purple school bus down an unpaved road strewn with M&Ms…a dinosaur among the passengers…someone screaming…but I don't remember how the dream ended because the alarm woke me up.

"Yes, the person who did this is in this…" the witness trailed off and dissolved into tears.

The old woman's eyes took on a faraway look. "Oh, yes, I was there. It was 1928, and my father had just lost his job.…" She stopped speaking and smiled sadly, lost in her memory.

"I didn't…umm…didn't mean…uhh…" The boy tried to hide his bat when a furious Mr. Williams appeared at the shattered window.

Every time I hear the museum is featuring Manet, I recall my former neighbor, who was a painter…but I digress.

Those examples demonstrate some of the meanings the ellipsis implies. When you have those ideas nailed, there is something else to consider as well: how the ellipsis is rendered typographically.

1) The ellipsis exists in two forms. When an ellipsis marks both the end of a thought and the end of a (grammatically) complete sentence, it consists typographically of four periods in a row. By contrast, an ellipsis that only marks a transition between unconnected thoughts, or the end of an incomplete thought but NOT a complete sentence, consists of only three periods in a row.

2) In most cases, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends that the ellipsis appear with spaces both surrounding and within the periods ( . . . ). The AP Stylebook also prefers spaces surrounding, but not between the periods ( ... ). Note that, although I've taken the time to insert code for the examples in this particular post, I generally pay no attention to either Chicago or AP's rule when I'm in a plain-text based area such as a blog. Yep, I cheat. And I'd bet huge amounts of cold, hard cash that I'm not the only English stickler who takes the easy way out when a word processor isn't there to do the dirty work (more on that below). The fact is, the extra spaces around and/or between the periods don't seem to be that important. Readers who are not typesetters will almost never notice the difference, and the spaceless version is far quicker to type as well as less prone to typing consistency errors.

3) When you type three periods in a row, your word processing program may change them unless you've specifically told it not to. Auto-correct defaults often are set to translate three periods to that single-character version of the ellipsis I mentioned above, which conveniently has those tiny spaces around it built right in.

This is a lot to absorb in one shot, so let's stop here. Meet me here on Word-wise again tomorrow to tackle the em dash half of the question.