Melanie Kalmanson is a commercial litigation attorney and former Florida Supreme Court law clerk. She is the author of the Bluebook Wednesday Tips Newsletter. Click here to subscribe to Melanie’s newsletter.
Tip #5, Ellipses (Rule 5.3)
An ellipsis is three periods WITH SPACES IN BETWEEN. Use ellipses to show where you’ve omitted text.
For example: Bluebook says that you indicate an omission “by the insertion of an ellipsis . . . to take the place of the word or words omitted.”
If you use an ellipsis at the end of the sentence, you simply put a period after the ellipsis WITH ANOTHER SPACE—meaning you have four dots.
For example:
❌ Bluebook says that you indicate an omission “by the insertion of an ellipsis . . .”
❌ Bluebook says that you indicate an omission “by the insertion of an ellipsis … .”
✅ Bluebook says that you indicate an omission “by the insertion of an ellipsis . . . .”
*Bonus tip: To make your ellipsis stay together, add a hard space in between the dots by using Ctrl + Shift + Space. (If you want more on hard spaces, go see Leah Tedford‘s post on hard spaces.)
Also note that, as Leah Tedford and Jenn Deal pointed out, the Microsoft default on ellipses is … . (That hurt my heart a little bit.) You have to manually enter the spaces to make it correct.
