Maryn said:
Be aware, too, that when you do use ellipses on purpose, there's a blank space (which I'll represent with an up-arrow) at the end of the series of three periods.
How had it gotten so late? There was barely enough time to...^to what? Something he had to do before five...^ Damn it, he needed to write these things down.
That's not how I'd punctuate this if it was in my WIP, but hey, an off-the-cuff ellipses example, what do you want?
Maryn, who recently had to slap someone's knuckles for the second time for not putting a blank space after periods or commas
Great that you bring this issue to the discussion, Maryn. I personally don't use any space. I tend to go with the simplest solution (i.e, three dots without space)--the influence of my engineering background. Never-cram-your-brain-with-unnecessary-information kind of approach that the dilettante side of me tend to resist.
Anyway, this quote might be of interest to some of you. Quoted from wikipedia (to be taken with a pinch of salt).
[edit] Ellipsis in English
The Chicago Manual of Style suggests the use of an ellipsis (also known as an ellipse) for any omitted word, phrase, line or paragraph from within a quoted passage. There are two commonly used methods of using ellipses: one uses three dots for any omission, the second makes a distinction between omissions within a sentence (using three dots: ...) and omissions between sentences (using a period and a space followed by three
nonbreaking-spaced dots: . . . .). Therefore, there is no such thing as a "four-dot ellipsis." A period followed by an ellipsis may look like four dots, but they are two separate entities.
Although some write ellipses without spaces, some institutions, such as the
Oxford University Press, place one space in front of three non-spaced periods. Thus: “I have seen something ...” instead of “I have seen something...” The exception here is when a word has been cut off in the middle; that is, when the ellipsis stands for a part of one word: “‘He said he realized he was wro…’ I stopped mid-word, awestruck.” (In English this is often written as “‘He said he realized he was wro—’ I stopped mid-word, awestruck.”)
