Euan H. said:
No offence, but ellipsis in the grammatical sense has a different meaning to ellipsis in the sense that is being used above.
Grammatical ellipsis is a system of omission of certain words. So frex, in the sentence "I went to the party and then went home", the Subject 'I' has been elided from the second clause. This kind of ellipsis is related to the grammatical system of substitution ("I went home and Jason did too"). English doesn't use three dots to mark this kind of ellipsis (nor AFAIK is it marked in this way in other languages).
The meaning of ellipsis above--three dots to indicate faltering speech--isn't the same thing.
In your example, no, it isn't generally used this way. But that isn't at all what I'm talking about. When I say missing words, I mean missing words, not just a word left out in an understood sentence.
It's used in partial quotes all over the place, and it's the way we always did it in journalism. You leave out part of a quotation, you replace this with a three dot ellipsis. You leave words out in the middle, you replace them with a three dot ellipsis. You leave off the end of a sentence, you replace the missing/unsaid words with a three dot ellipsis plus a period. When you leave out a significant number of words because they aren't important to the overall meaning, you do use an ellipsis to indicate this.
If someone says, "In my humble opinion, Twinkies and better that Ding Dongs," you may quote him as saying ". . .Twinkies are better than Ding dongs."
If somone says, "Twinkies are better than Ding Dongs, hot dogs are better than hamburgers, but Twinkies are not as good as Ho-Ho's," you might quote him as saying "Twinkies are better than Ding Dongs. . .but Twinkies are not as good as Ho-Ho's."
If someone says, "Twinkies are better than Ding Dongs, and hot dogs are better than hamburgers," but your article is about Twinkies, you might quote him as saying "Twinkies are better than Ding Dongs. . . ."
Quotations are dialogue, and so the same technique is used whenever a subject lets a sentence trail off. You quote the trailing off sentence, and end it with a three dot ellipsis plus a period.
I can only say it was done this way by all my professors, both jounalism and English, and has been used this way in newspapers and nonfiction for more years than comics have been around. It's also been done this way in fiction for a very long time. It isn't new, and all the English I read DOES use three dots to mark this kind of ellipsis. At least, every guide I can find outside of Chicago says it is. So do the dictionaries. For that matter, so does Holy Mother Grammatica, and that's good enough for me. And there's seldom a day when I don't see an ellipsis used this way in print somewhere.
I think the problem is that too many grammarians have tried to turn the ellipsis into something new, and it hasn't worked out very well.
This is old hat. It was done this way in my youth, and it was done this way in my professor's youths. Newspapers and nonfiction books have been doing this forever. It's still done this way. I haven't in fact, seen any other way it can be done. Using dashes to indicate dialogue that trails off doesn't even make sense, any more than it would make sense to use dashes to show the first half of a quotation has been left off.
Dashes are often used to show doalogue has been interrupted, even in journalism, but an interruption is a very different critter. An interruption is from an outside source, while dialogue that simply trails off is the choice of the speaker. The way to show that it trails off, that it was the speaker's choice to leave the sentence unfinished, is with a three dot ellipsis and a period.
