What is the proper use of ellipses in omitting pieces of quoted text?

Factual Questions
1

I want to quote something in an academic paper but leave a part out. How should it look?

A. He said that he was “on a mission to discover a way… to split an atom.”
B. He said that he was “on a mission to discover a way […] to split an atom.”
C. He said that he was “on a mission to discover a way to split an atom.”
D. some other way

2

A is closest. There should be a space between the ellipsis and the word on either end. Also, when I was a doctoral dissertation copy editor 15 years ago, the accepted style was a space between the periods. So …

He said that he was “on a mission to discover a way . . . to split an atom.”

Note: If your ellipsis comes at the end of a sentence, you add a fourth period to indicate the end of the sentence, just as you would if there were words there.

3

I would go for B. I was taught that … on it’s own indicated a pause in speech, whereas […] indicated an omissions of words. Having said that, I’d imagine different publishing houses, etc, would have different guidelines.

4

If you’re doing an academic paper I assume you need to follow MLA style. That’s easily searched for.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/04/

You need to doublecheck whether the controlling guide is the MLA Handbook or the MLA Style Guide since they seem to be contradictory.

5

My wife is a former editor for Simon & Schuster. She was taught (and I have always followed) that there should be three dots between segments of text, and four at the end (one of which is the period). No extraneous spaces. So the sentence:

Jack, Jane, Sarah and Jeff went out for lunch together, but decided not to have dessert.

Would become:

Jack…and Jeff went out for lunch together…

6

There are two related questions. One – when do you need to use ellipses to denote elided text? Two – what is the proper formatting for the ellipsis?

The second one is easy – it’s whatever the style manual your program uses says to do. The first one’s probably covered in that manual too, but the sacrosanct rule is that if you’re putting something in quotation marks and you’re eliding words that were present in the original, you’ve got to use an ellipsis.

Brackets are different, which is why B. is wrong. Brackets mean you’re substituting your word for the original speaker’s word, but that you’re not changing the meaning in relevant part. So you use them for changing tenses, gender, removing proper names, simplifying lists, or other [expletive deleted] like that. The only things that go inside brackets, therefore, are words (or parts of words) that weren’t in the original.

Mein gott! Aren’t these things taught in the gymnasia these days?

–Cliffy