Punctuation Problems: Unfinished or Interrupted Dialog

When a person is speaking and doesn’t finish their thought, it happens in one of two ways. Either they trail off gradually, drawing out the last word and dropping in volume, or they cut off abruptly in mid-sentence or even mid-word.

Trailing off can indicate that the person has become lost in thought (and possibly forgotten to finish their sentence), that they have become distracted by something they see or hear, or that they are trying to suggest the unspoken final words without actually saying them. Whichever the circumstance, trailing off will always be indicated by ellipses at the end of the sentence:

     “Well, the experiment might work if we switched out the copper conductors . . .”

     “What in the world is going on . . .”

     “We do know someone who takes care of these sort of problems . . .”

Most writers use ellipses properly to indicate trailed-off dialog. However, I also often see them used to indicate speech that has cut off abruptly or been interrupted, which is incorrect. In those cases, the em dash is the appropriate punctuation:

     “I’ve figured it out!” Javid shouted. “The murderer is—”

     A gunshot cracked through the night, and Javid suddenly collapsed.

     “I am speaking,” Bernadette said, “even though I don’t—”

     “I am interrupting you, madam!”  Gabriel interrupted, “because I love the sound of my own—”

     “Well I shall simply interrupt you back, sir! For I must—”

     “Fool! My capacity for interrupting others far exceeds your own.”

Remember: ellipses indicate trailed-off dialog, and the em dash indicates abruptly cut-off dialog. No exceptions.

It's unfinished and incomplete, see?

Look, some elements of grammar and punctuation just don't lend themselves to perfect visual metaphors, all right? Trying to find a good picture for this post was hard. Thanks for reading, just move on now.

Formatting for Publishing: Find and Replace

A subtle way to polish up your finished manuscript before sending it to a publisher is to do a few quick “find and replace” runs.  There are a lot of little formatting errors that crop up in a manuscript while you’re working—some are simple mis-types, some are the result of editing, and others can be the consequence of opening a document in multiple programs (Microsoft Word and Google Docs, for instance). Most of them can be easily fixed en masse.

Open the “Find and Replace” window by hitting Ctrl+H in Microsoft Word or Google Docs (command+shift+f and command+shift+h in their respective Mac versions). If you’ve never used “find and replace” before, it’s simple—whatever combination of characters you type in the first text box will be replaced by the combination of characters you put in the second text box. You can change each instance one at a time or all of them en masse.

Image from creativelycheap.com

A note of caution: it is very easy to create new errors with the mass “Replace All” option. For instance, say you’ve written a scene where one of the characters is using a pen. You decide afterward that you want them to be writing with a pencil instead, so you do a “Replace All” to replace the word pen with pencil. Unfortunately, the “Replace All” option has now substituted pencil for every instance of the letters pen. Open had now become opencil, pensive is now pencilsive, and so forth. So use this carefully.

Here are a few easy clean-ups that you can use to make your manuscript more presentable:

     Find:                                                       Replace with:

     Repeated spaces ([space][space])           Single space                      

If you need an indent, use paragraph formatting or tabs. Repeat this replacement until you get 0 results.

     Find:                                                       Replace with:

     Repeated paragraph breaks (^p^p)         Single paragraph break (^p)

Most “Find and Replace” features recognize a “carat p” (^p) as a formula representing a paragraph break. If you need space between paragraphs use the “add space after” feature in paragraph formatting. Repeat this replacement until you get 0 results.

     Find:                                                                    Replace with:

     Space at beginning of paragraph (^p[space])      Paragraph break (^p)

Or if you used tabs for the indents at the beginning of your paragraph:

     Find:                     Replace with:

     (^p^t[space])         (^p^t)

The ^t indicates a “tab” in most programs. This replace ensures that your paragraphs will all be aligned properly. If you’ve already replaced all of the repeated spaces, you shouldn’t have to run this replacement more than once.

     Find:                                                                       Replace with:

     Space at the end of a paragraph ([space]^p)          Paragraph break (^p)

This is very minor clutter, but there’s no reason to leave it.

     Find:                                                      Replace with:

     Repeated periods (..)                             Single period (.)

Note: if you format your ellipses as three periods (…), this will cause trouble. That’s one of the reasons I format my ellipses with spaces (. . .) instead. If you don’t have spaces in your ellipses, you’ll want to replace repeated periods one at a time (using “replace” and “find next” instead of “replace all”).

     Find:                                                    Replace with:

     Comma and period (,.) and (.,)            Comma (,) or period (.)

This is another that you’ll have to replace one at a time, since it’s the only way to ensure that you’re putting in the correct punctuation. Fortunately, there probably won’t be many of these in your manuscript. They usually crop up were a large section of a sentence was deleted but the old punctuation was missed.

     Find:                                         Replace with:

     Apostrophes ( ′ )                       Apostrophes ( ‘ )

Note the difference between those two apostrophes—one is straight, and one is curved. The straight apostrophe is an artifact of older typing programs or some non-text-focused programs that appears from time to time. If you’re using Word or Google Docs, however, the program will automatically replace each old-fashioned straight apostrophe with a curved one that faces the correct direction. (Note that you don’t have to hunt for an old straight apostrophe to put into your “find” box. Just put an apostrophe, and the program will figure it out.)

     Find:                                         Replace with:

     Quotation marks ( ″ )                Quotation marks ( “ )

    

Same thing—old-fashioned “double-prime” straight quotation marks should be replaced with curved ones.

     Find:                                          Replace with:

     Double hyphens (--)                  Em dash (—) or (^+)

Double hyphens aren’t actually proper punctuation—you’ll want an actual em dash in there instead.

     Find:                                         Replace with:

     Repeated tabs (^t^t)                  Single tab (^t)

Note: if you have used tabs as indentation, and you have any sections that indented further than the rest of the document (quoted passages, for instance), this could mess them up. It might be wise to replace these one at a time.

Now, I’m not saying any of these tips will get you published. They will, however, help you polish out a few common errors from your manuscript. This will result in a more professional-looking submission, which is an important step toward getting published. Good luck!

Ellipses

Ellipses (or more properly, ellipsis points) are the three periods (...) used to indicate omission or hesitation in prose.

They can be formatted in several different ways. When indicating omission, you can have ellipses with no spaces (word...word); with spaces after and before the words but not within the ellipses (word ... word); or with spaces between each character (word . . . word). When indicating hesitation, you can have ellipses with a space after (word... word); or with spaces between each character (word . . . word). Personally, I strongly recommend ellipses with spaces (word . . . word).

In stories, ellipses are most often used to indicate hesitation in dialog. Some examples:

     "I think . . . that we should take the gorilla with us," Ben said.
     ". . . How are we going to fit it in the car?" Erin asked.
     "Well . . . we could maybe, um . . . well, no . . ."
     "No . . . ?"
     Ben shook his head. "No . . . I guess we can't take it with us."

Note that when ellipses are used to indicate hesitation at the beginning of the sentence (in the second line), the sentence still begins with a capital letter. When the ellipses indicate a question that has trailed off, they are followed by a question mark, as shown in the fourth line.

Ellipses aren't often used to indicate omission in stories; that's a use that tends to spring up more in academic writing, when quoting another author. However, on occasion, you might use ellipses in your story to indicate that illegible or indistinct words have been omitted:

     Ben squinted at the old note. The pencil had smeared or faded in places, leaving many of the words illegible. All he could make out was, "Diana . . . should have met . . . before I left. I . . . have seen you . . . to face."

     Erin pressed her ear to the door. Her manager and the strange woman were having a conversation, but she could only make out bits and pieces of the conversation.
     "I don't think . . . be here," her manager said.
     "It doesn't matter . . . think. She's . . . with me," the woman replied.

Things to look out for

Be consistent: You can format your ellipses with or without spaces; just make sure that you use the same formatting throughout your entire manuscript.

Avoid using ellipses outside of your dialog: The primary purpose of ellipses in dialog is to mimic the natural hesitations and pauses of human speech. You can also use them in your character's thoughts to similar effect. However, unless you're writing in first person, you should avoid using ellipses outside of dialog, as it will make your prose seem overly informal and disjointed.

Avoid over-using ellipses: Even in dialog, a large cluster of ellipses will distract your reader's eyes and interrupt the flow of the text. Look at each ellipses in your manuscript and ask yourself, what does this ellipses mean? Is it indicating a meaningful pause for thought or showing a character's discomfort? Is this pause really necessary?

Don't break up your ellipsis points: Your word processor will split lines of text at any available space. This means that you can sometimes have one or two ellipsis points at the end of one line and the remaining one or two points at the beginning of the next line. It's not really a mistake, but it sure doesn't look good. If you spot this happening, try putting some non-breaking spaces between the ellipsis points (usually in the menu under Insert > Insert Special Characters > Non-breaking Space). These will give you the proper spaces between the points without letting the processor split them up.