When Should I Use Ellipses? Never.

Yesterday I led a business writing class for a group of sales managers and other sales professionals near Portland, Oregon. As in other classes, these questions came up: "What about dot dot dot? When should I use that?"

The answer: Never.

Well, almost never.

These days business messages are filled with dot dot dots, whose official name is ellipses. People are using ellipses to pause, shift gears, trail off, and figure out what to write next. Unfortunately, none of those uses inspires confidence in readers, who wonder what the writer is doing. Does the pause mean something ominous? 

Just yesterday I received an email from someone who was worried about what the ellipsis after his name in an email might mean. He wrote, "I am trying to discern the tone of the email and the use of the ellipsis following my name." The email he had received began something like this:

David . . . thank you for offering a suggestion about the new incentive program.  

Why did the person who wrote to David (not his real name) use an ellipsis? My guess is that the writer had simply developed the bad habit of sprinkling ellipses here and there in his writing.

David wanted to know when an ellipsis is appropriate following a greeting. The answer: Never.

Yes, I admit there are appropriate uses of ellipses when quoting. I have written about those uses in the post "Using . . . Ellipses," which you will find here. But for sales managers and everyone else who does normal business writing without the use of extended quotations, an ellipsis is never the solution. Don't waste a moment worrying about them.

Lynn
Syntax Training

Comments

[Liz Tucker]

The other thing that more and more work emails seemed to be littered with is exclamation marks. It might occasionally be acceptable to use one, but an email full of them,quickly loses any impact.

[Diane]

I use an ellipsis when sending an IM message to mean "I am not finished with my comment yet." It's a handy piece of punctuation for IM, because the person on the other end of the IM has no way of knowing if I am done with my comment simply because I stop typing. Without a piece of punctuation to pause the conversation, IM messages from the sender and the receiver often overlap, resulting in confusion.

[Lynn Gaertner-Johnston]

Liz, I am seeing them too!!!

Lynn

[Lynn Gaertner-Johnston]

Diane, thanks for your point about ellipses in instant messages. If your reader knows what your ellipses mean, you are communicating effectively.

Very clever!

Lynn

[Joanne]

I'm a little late reading this post but I am so glad you wrote it. We have someone in our office who uses an ellipsis at the end of every sentence instead of a period. His emails drive me insane!

[Penny]

I found myself at times using the ... and thought nothing of it. However, after I began receiving messages loaded with them, it did not take long for me to stop to using the...'s