Ellipsis Follow Up

[dragonmaster_x]

In prescriptive English grammar, is this correct?

“What am I going to do…what if they kill mother?”

Or should it be:

“What am I going to do… What if they kill mother?”

or some other variant?

Comments

[apollotiger]

I'd put it as: “What am I going to do? … what if they kill mother?”

[conuly]

"What am I going to do? What if they kill Mother?"

Not that punctuation is my strong suit.

[jkrissw]

I agree. The ellipsis doesn't belong there.

[vilakins]

Thirded!

[kasak]

Since you have two complete clauses there, I think it might be more correct to put them as seperate sentences:

"What am I going to do? What if they kill mother?"

The ellipsis there just doesn't look correct to me. I can't give you any specific rule as to why that is the case, something about it just looks off.

[solaria]

From my experience, ellipsis is used in prescriptive English grammar predominantly to show that some words are missing, such as when one quotes something and removes the relevant parts. However, I've also seen it used a lot in dialogue or when a character is thinking to show a span of time between two thoughts, or a trailing off of sorts. I think that in this case, it looks especially funny (from a prescriptive grammar point of view) because "What am I going to do..." is a question, yet the proper question punctuation isn't used. I agree with conuly that the proper form would be "What am I going to do? What if they kill Mother?" (The M is capitalized here because Mother is being used as a proper noun.)

If this were just a story and wasn't being used in a very strict academic setting though, the ellipsis wouldn't bother me (just for the record), since most fiction tends to be written more in the vernacular than the prescriptive language.

[markusn]

I often use the elipsis to indicate trailing off of thought, or for the reader to insert their own thoughts there. I see nothing wrong with the example given. I'd go with rivendellrose's suggestion.

[sparkofcreation]

"What am I going to do?... What if they kill Mother?"

Unless you're quoting from somewhere and omitting part, in which case it's "What am I going to do? [. . .] What if they kill Mother?" At least in MLA format.

I can't swear to the first one with absolute certainty, but I did write an entire [short, but still] chapter of my MA thesis on the use of ellipses in English and Spanish. I just checked the second one in my MLA handbook.

[ms_cucumber]

Three periods indicate a trailing off in the middle of a sentence or at the end of an incomplete sentence. Four periods indicate trailing off at the end of a complete sentence.