Nitpick this thread

Where’s Sicily?
mangeorge, defender of things southern.

Give over, SSG Schwartz, this ain’t never gonna be another Thread Killer™ thread. :smiley:

Just a nitpick, but this thread is better

SSG Schwartz

You forgot to add a period again.

Dammit…That should leave me a few ahead.
SSG Schwartz

However, an ellipsis within a sentence, under most English language conventions, should only have three dots.

Moreover, “Dammit” either should have been changed to the more proper “damn it”, or else have an exclamation point immediately after it.

How many exclamation points are aloud???

All of them.

The ellipsis limits it to one. If on a separate line, more would be possible.

Should there be a space on either side of an ellipsis or not?

Yes.

Just in case I’m not the only one who wasn’t sure what an elipsis is.

Sigh… you spelled ellipsis wrong.

ETA: I’m not a grammer person myself, but there’s no way “Just in case I’m not the only one who wasn’t sure what an elipsis is.” is a correctly put together sentence.

That would be ‘allowed.’
ETA: Sorry mangeorge, didn’t mean to hit you twice in a row.

And a properly typeset ellipsis is this: “…” not this “…”

(And that leaves me with a conundrum. I need to add a period to the end of that sentence, but American style rules require it to be inside the quotations. However, putting it inside the quotation may add confusion, since obviously an ellipsis does not equal four periods. Is there any elegant solution without recasting the sentence?)

An ellipsis on the Mac is Option-; and on Windows it’s Alt-0133.

The American rules of style are shifting away from the hard and fast rule that periods must be inside quotation marks, especially when adherance to that rule might cause confusion in the reader. You may place a period beyond the quotation marks in your sentence.
Starting your sentence with a conjuction such as “and” is still frowned upon where it can be avoided.

Eh, it’s used all the time in fiction and informal writing. I like it. But this is the nitpick thread. And another nitpick: “conjunction.”

Is “eh” a word?!?!

Are four punctuation marks really necessary at the end of a sentence???

Nitpick: no.