In this series of blogs, Writing Woes, I will share with you some amusing insights on the mistakes people inadvertently make when writing, based on my work as a professional tutor and as a writer for Summit University. (You can visit my tutoring website here: https://lynnthetutor.com)
Here we go!
You’re all writers, so you know all about ellipses (the plural of ellipsis, right?) We English speakers like to be concise; we might even be a tad lazy, so if we leave out a few words here and there we expect our audiences to fill in the blanks.
And we have that cute little punctuation mark to indicate an ellipsis: … . (On my Mac that’s Option+semicolon.) Four dots at the end of a sentence, please. Mustn’t leave out the period.
But mostly we don’t even use the three dots. We omit words with reckless abandon at the fronts, middles, and ends of sentences.
I’m enjoying this. You?
Writing dialogue, we let sentences trail off and be interrupted and feel we have communicated everything needed by adding three dots.
“I think I’ll go to…”
“No! You said you’d stay.”
And it’s all very satisfactory. We and our audiences are of one mind. Who needs all those pesky words anyway?
But somebody has to tell the pronoun.
You are faster than _____.
Are you faster than him? Or faster than he? There is an invisible ellipsis here. The tiny word “is” has been omitted. The full sentence truly is:
You are faster than he is.
This is the booby trap for writers and speakers who use ellipses. Most speakers say “him” without even blushing. A writer I read this week answered this conundrum by using “himself.” (Heaven forbid!)
I can run faster than _____.
You got it that time, right?
I can run faster than he can run.
There are insidious ellipses like these lurking everywhere, confusing the poor pronoun, and intending to destroy your grammatical reputation.
Be wary. :-)
Lynn The Tutor
(My tutoring website: https://lynnthetutor.com)