• Ellipses, Brackets, and Quotation Marks

• Ellipses can be very helpful in a rhetorical grammar sense.  They can be used for omissions that you intentionally make and to show hesitancy in your writing.

• One of my favorite sonnets that Shakespeare wrote starts "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . . oh no, it is an ever fixed mark." (This sentence leaves out a portion of the quote.)
• Sabrina said, "Tim, don't go...just stay a while".

• Brackets are often misused. They can be used in the following ways:

• In quotations, use square brackets to indicate that you have personally added your own words (usually to clarify) in quote passages: My mom said, "It's just as well that she [Debbie] is gone.
• You can also use square brackets to insert words to make a quotation understandable or grammatical:  My mom was angry that she [Debbie] has stolen from us.
• Some teachers may ask you to use angle brackets in email addresses and URLs:  You can reach Mrs. McCoy on the faculty portal at <http://www.clarendoncollege.edu> or by emailing her at <Melissa.mccoy@clarendoncollege.edu>.

• Quotation marks can be used the following ways:

• Direct quotations: you must use quotation marks around all the other material that is directly borrowed from other sources or to indicate someone's words in dialogue.
• Titles:  You will use quotation marks to show titles of magazine articles, television episodes, poems, short stories, songs, and other short works.  (When you are talking about titles of longer works, like newspapers, magazines, novels, films, television shows, and anthologies, italics are used instead.)
• Single quotation marks:  when you are using a quotation within a quotation, you use a single quotation mark around the quotation within.
• Other punctuation
• Commas and periods always go inside quotation marks.
• Question marks and exclamation marks go inside the quotation marks when the quoted material is a question or an exclamation and outside the quotation marks when the whole sentence is a question or an exclamation.
• Who said, "Help me"? (whole sentence is a question)
• Jared said, "I did!" (The exclamation is the quoted material.)

 

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