Answer: What is the correct punctuation for speech that "trails off"?

[theemdash]

with examples from Stargate: SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Fullmetal Alchemist

velocitygrass asks: What is the correct punctuation for speech that "trails off"? What is the punctuation for interruption (either by yourself or someone else)?Many people will tell you that trailing-off punctuation is largely a result of stylistic choices. Personally, I disagree

Comments

[velocitygrass]

I read your reasoning and maybe the explanation for me is that I write in a fixed-width text editor where . . . is just a loooot of space. It just hurts my eyes ;)

Although now I have to ask: If I don't use spaces, is there no space at all if the sentence trails off and a new one begins?

"I didn't know that I.... I mean, since I left her, I've thought about it all the time."

or

"I didn't know that I... . I mean, since I left her, I've thought about it all the time."

Okay, the second one looks strange to me. I think generally a space before a period looks strange to me.

The "m" length is an approximation, but basically as long as your em dash is longer than an en dash, it's understandable.
Yes in terms of differentiation it doesn't matter to be precisely of that length. But I think it does make a difference visually. I'm somewhat picky in terms of aesthetics (at least in some cases). And the humongous - in Times New Roman makes me uncomfortable. Look at this comparison between Georgia and Times New Roman on your first example:



Georgia looks quite nice whereas for Times New Roman the em dash is possibly longer than the "we" and it also bleeds into the e and touches u and b. Thank God, I don't see this when I write, so I'll just use -- in my text editor and I have already modified my little macro that replaces * with HTML for italics to now replace "--" with "—", so I should be all set now :)

[theemdash]

If you don't use spaces, it should look like this:

"I didn't know that I.... I mean, since I left her, I've thought about it all the time."

If we weren't on the internet, a printer would probably use a slight space between the dots in the ellipsis (making it look sort of like this: "I didn't know that I. ... I mean, since I left her, I've thought about it all the time."), but for internet purposes, absolutely no spaces is all right.

What's funny is that I think the em dash in Georgia looks too short. Heh. I greatly prefer the look of it in Times New Roman. (Though I possible see it more often in Times New Roman which is what that looks fine to me.)

[velocitygrass]

Ah, thank you!

Maybe it's really just a matter of getting used to it. :)