Now that we’ve discussed commas, semi-colons, colons, dashes, parentheses, and apostrophes, we are ready to cap off our punctuation discussion with the ellipsis, brackets, and quotation marks. These last few helpful points will ensure you’re well-rounded when punctuating your writing.
First of all, the ellipsis can be used in creative writing or academic writing, depending on the reason. If you are trying to be creative, using an ellipsis shows either the speaker or narrator are trailing off in their speech. This can set the stage for suspense or interruption. If you are trying to include a quote without using too much information, you might use the ellipsis to truncate the quoted material and keep the context of the original author’s writing. For example, you might say, “studies show that… overall the medication worked” — if you want to omit statistic data that really isn’t needed for your audience.
Next, we have the brackets, which are different from parentheses. Suppose you’re quoting a source that uses pronouns in a particularly well-written sentence; however, your audience isn’t aware of who the pronouns are referring to. In that case, you’ll want to use brackets. For example, you might say, “[Mrs. Doe] told the reports that she saw the car drive towards the mall.” If you are changing capitalization, you will also want to use brackets for the first letter being quoted. “[S]ources indicate that this might help” would be the correct way use brackets in this instance.
Last but not least, the quotation marks can trip up many of my students. Do you include punctuation within them? Do you use the double or single quotation marks? Do you use them for block quotations? Obviously, they aren’t just simple punctuation used in stories to indicate dialogue between characters. If you are ending a sentence (without an in-text citation) or clause, include the end punctuation inside the quotation marks. Don’t leave the period, comma, or other mark outside. If you are writing a quote within a quote, use the single quotation marks (“She said, ‘do it this way.'”). Finally, don’t use quotation marks for a block quote. The very nature of a block quote implies you’re using a source’s original information, so they are unnecessary in this case.
This concludes the series on punctuation for now. Using the tips and knowledge from the last three weeks, you should be able to punctuate your writing with ease!
