Ellipsis

[majes]

I'm working on my NaNoRenO game and wanted some input on something since this is my first attempt at a VN. I'm wondering about what I should do to handle ellipsis. For instance, the following:

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"Well...aside from the dead bodies."
"They knew too much about...everything. They needed to be...cleaned."

Now, should I leave the code as is, or put in pauses between each period like follows?

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"Well{w=1}.{w=1}.{w=1}.{w=1}aside from the dead bodies."
"They knew too much about{w=1}.{w=1}.{w=1}.{w=1}everything.{w} They needed to be{w=1}.{w=1}.{w=1}.{w=1}cleaned."

Or should I tell my writer to try and get rid of as many ellipsis as possible? Thoughts anyone?

[sake-bento]

Please don't do that second option. I can almost guarantee you will lose readers if you do that. Actually, please try to hold back on the ellipsis in general, especially as a standalone line.

As in, none of these shenanigans, please:

"..."
"..."
".............."
"I don't know."

In general, I think people overuse ellipses. I know I abuse them pretty often, but I do my best to keep it down. There's almost always a better way to describe silence or waiting, and commas really are wondrous little creatures for inserting pauses in sentences. I truly do love the ellipsis, but it gets a lot more use than it should.

[Wintermoon]

I like ellipses. As far as ways of showing pauses or silence go, ellipses are highly economical. Why waste a words on something that can be said with just three dots?

Forced pauses (be they {w=1} or {w}), on the other hand, are highly uneconomical. I hate them.

[number473]

You might use a forced pause with an ellipsis to break up sections or to show that time is passing (travelling etc). I know that a lot of people on this forum consider it a bad idea to do anything that stops the reader from just going ahead with reading at their maximum speed, or at least they find it personally irritating. I consider it to be a valid device for controlling the tempo, though. But a wait of one second is way too long, probably go with 0.5 - 0.2 or less, and use sparingly.

[luminarious]

Also, three dots in a row (...) is not an ellipsis. Ellipsis is a specific character (…) that most fonts have. Alt+0133 is the command for ellipsis under Windows.

Yes, I'm quite fond of typography, thank you..

[number473]

2. Printing. a mark or marks as ——, …, or * * *, to indicate an omission or suppression of letters or words.

(My emphasis)
The special symbol has it's uses but three periods are usually used in VNs I think because of the spacing and the fact that you can draw them one at a time. Personal preference mostly, but if you were typesetting a document rather than a VN it would of course be the right way to go.

[Jake]

I like ellipses. As far as ways of showing pauses or silence go, ellipses are highly economical. Why waste a words on something that can be said with just three dots?

Forced pauses (be they {w=1} or {w}), on the other hand, are highly uneconomical. I hate them.

I would agree with this entirely, with the caveat that while:

...

is a good way to show a pause or silence,

...
......
.........
............

is almost as bad as forced pauses. If you need to make the reader aware that someone's quiet for more than the usual missed-beat in conversation, then narrate it or something. Not for economy, just because ellipsis stacks are boring to read through.


That said, I would also advise caution. It's not uncommon for people to over-use ellipsis and start inserting it into sentences where commas would do equally well just because they think it makes their characters more brooding and mysterious. Used sparingly, ellipsis works very well to convey the pace of dialogue; used liberally, it often just makes it look like your characters are half asleep and have trouble forming coherent sentences without lots of thinking.

Also, three dots in a row (...) is not an ellipsis. Ellipsis is a specific character (…) that most fonts have. Alt+0133 is the command for ellipsis under Windows.

... as far as writing goes, the two are effectively one and the same, the same as an e-acute character and an acute accent composed with an 'e' are the same. It's possible to hand-write ellipsis, after all! In fact, some style guides recommend spaces between the dots (". . ."), which the font glyph for ellipsis is generally the opposite of.

Complaining about people using two hyphens for an em-dash is far more productive, IMO... :P

[pinkmouse]

I like ellipses. As far as ways of showing pauses or silence go, ellipses are highly economical. Why waste a words on something that can be said with just three dots?

The problem as I see it is that ellipses don't add any further information. Consider:

Chris: "So, are we going to meet up later?"
Jo: ...
Chris: "We don't have to, if you don't want."

versus

Chris: "So, are we going to meet up later?"
Jo continues stuffing the envelopes, her lips a thin line.
Chris: "We don't have to, if you don't want."

or

Chris: "So, are we going to meet up later?"
Jo looks down, her cheeks flushing.
Chris: "We don't have to, if you don't want."

Just using ellipses for a complete response means that you're neglecting the opportunity to flesh out the situation, IMNSHO. Words are the minority component in any communication. Body language, tone of voice and even the speed of delivery are all significant.

That's not to say that I'm a total anti-ellipsis bigot - I find ellipses useful as a sort of "super comma" for when a character is struggling to say something. e.g.

Chris: "Oh no, don't think that. It's just ... well perhaps I shouldn't say it, but you can be a little ... sharp sometimes."

Actually I'd probably go back and remove one or other of the ellipses above - they're like exclamation marks, I find: the more you use them, the less they mean. So I ration myself.


Totally agree with you about the forced pauses and "..." "......" etc. though. I find them really annoying because the writer is forcing me to do work (hitting return) and I get nothing.

[prezzey]

I don't like single lines which consist of ellipses, probably mostly because I used to know someone who used them on online chat to indicate passive-aggressiveness! So I try not to use them myself because I remember the effect they had on me ^^;

And multiple lines of ellipses to show the passage of time are better done with a line of narration and/or some scene change. IMO at least!

[Jake]

Words are the minority component in any communication. Body language, tone of voice and even the speed of delivery are all significant.

This is true, for actual human interaction. But when you're writing a VN, you're not going to be bombarding the reader with all that information all the time, surely? If you give the reader too much information, it stifles the imagination, because the more information you explicitly give them, the more likely it is to conflict in an unimportant way with their mental image of the scene so far. The reader's imagination is one of the most important tools a writer can potentially exploit, it can evoke smell and colour and shape and sound and texture and all kinds of other things you can only hint at with words, and giving it too much explicit information makes it less likely to be able to work well enough to draw the reader in.

To go back to your example, for instance, there's also a big difference between:

"So, are we going to meet up later?" asked Chris, a hopeful tone in his voice.
Jo continues stuffing the envelopes, her lips a thin line.
"We don't have to, if you don't want." said Chris, hesitantly.

and

"So, are we going to meet up later?" asked Chris, with a teasing inflection in his voice.
Jo continues stuffing the envelopes, her lips a thin line.
"We don't have to, if you don't want." He was openly mocking her, now, repeating the last lines of her nervous conversation with Jeremy in the hall earlier.

should we always add such information to dialogue there, as well? Should we detail how the characters are standing, what they're doing with their hands, where they're looking, how fast they're breathing, all the time?

If the reader knows that Chris has a crush on Jo and has just offended her inadvertently, then they're going to read the words the way they're described in the first example in their head anyway, and if they'd seen the previous conversation that Chris alludes to in the second scene and know a bit of his character, they don't need to be given the intonation. They already know it, because the reader is a human being with experience of having conversations with other human beings themselves. And being too detailed also risks the reader thinking "why are they telling me all this? It's obvious!".

More to the point, VNs are generally told from the first person perspective, and when you ask a question like that you're expecting a response - the ellipsis is far closer to the experience of sitting through an uncomfortable silence than the flat description of what the character does instead. You're not focussing on the fact that she's stuffing envelopes, you're focussing on the fact that she's not saying anything.



Anyway, I certainly wouldn't say that it's never a good idea to describe what's happening instead of using ellipsis, just that I'd shy away from saying it's always a good idea. Expanding upon the situation isn't always a good idea.

I don't like single lines which consist of ellipses, probably mostly because I used to know someone who used them on online chat to indicate passive-aggressiveness! So I try not to use them myself because I remember the effect they had on me ;) ^^;

You should really consider that since they elicit a profound emotional response, it's quite possible that other people would have the same kind of reaction, and thus that such ellipsis could be a powerful tool to convey that kind of character. Generally creative writing is about getting across well-rounded, believable characters more than it's about making your reader comfortable, after all.

[luminarious]

Show, don't tell.

Unless you're telling the story in first person. You might risk running into full-on Hemingway mode with people sighing and not telling what they mean or want, and that may be oppressively realistic. But it's also a lot more dramatic.

[Meems]

When I write visual novels, the dialogue isn't so much,

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"Blah blah blah," said Bob.

as it is

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Bob: Blah blah blah.

So I quite like ellipses, because I feel slipping into narration to describe every pause would a) get boring fast, and b) break up the flow of the dialogue.

No long strings of

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.......
.....
...
..
.

though. That's horribly boring to click through. And anyway, more or less than three dots isn't an ellipsis, it's a violation of grammar.

[prezzey]

You should really consider that since they elicit a profound emotional response, it's quite possible that other people would have the same kind of reaction, and thus that such ellipsis could be a powerful tool to convey that kind of character.

Hmmm, that's a good idea, I'll keep it in mind if I want to infuriate the player! (My current 2 unfinished games don't really have a slot for that kind of character, but there can always be more...)

[pinkmouse]

Words are the minority component in any communication. Body language, tone of voice and even the speed of delivery are all significant.

This is true, for actual human interaction. But when you're writing a VN, you're not going to be bombarding the reader with all that information all the time, surely?

Well, when you're telling a story you're modelling human interaction, so at times all of those factors can be relevant. The skill of modelling is knowing what to put in and what to leave out.

If you give the reader too much information, it stifles the imagination, because the more information you explicitly give them, the more likely it is to conflict in an unimportant way with their mental image of the scene so far.

Agreed. Too much of anything is, by definition, bad. But giving the reader relevant information which leads their imagination in the direction you want is what storytelling is all about. My point was that by using ellipses as a sole response, the writer was missing an opportunity to give the reader such information.

Thinking it over later, I realized that in a VN, some of the unspoken component would be carried by the artwork, rather than the text, which I hadn't really allowed for. (Not surprising, given my meagre drawing talent.) On the other hand, drawing a whole extra pose takes a lot longer than writing a sentence of description, so you pays your money and you takes your choice, I guess.

[KomiTsuku]

The only thing I will say on the matter, as I see the use of ellipsis as author's personal preference, is that it is three dots. Not 4, not 10, not 2. 3 dots... okay?