I can't help it... The lack of understanding from people about how to use dot, dot, dot, is frustrating and annoying!

[wildhairrunning]

Why oh why are there so few people out there who use the 'points of elipsis' rule correctly? When you use dot, dot, dot, (...) it is THREE and only three dots, not however many you feel like putting

Like this... Then begin a new sentence with a space
Or...like this (for use in a sentence

Please people, use your dots correctly, it's driving me mad!

Aibu?!

Wot about us dashes then?

Can someone please explain to me why only 3 dots are allowed? Explain to me the rule please.

Quidsi - an ellipsis is just three dots. It isn't a rule so much as a fact - in the same way a colon is one dot above another dot, the ellipsis is three dots one after the other.

However, depending upon placement within a sentence, there may be further punctuation immediately before or after it - so if the ellipsis is at the end of a sentence and followed by a period (full stop) then it will look like there are 4 dots. Or there could be 3 dots and an exclamation mark, or question mark, or comma....

In typesetting, the ellipsis can be a single entity rather than three separate dots - in computers, there's a single unicode character and html entity ? (that's ampersand hellip semicolon) which (to me, in the font I'm using anyway) looks more compact than three dots ...

Very interesting, my son was taught in YR2. Bypassed me in school also bypassed his older brother in Y5 (same school). It is part of the punctuation requirements to achieve levels 4, 5 and 6 in writing.

multiple exclamation marks make the writer seem under 12 years of age, I think...

So what?!!!!

Cool, better than a facelift!!!!!! No.......?

go to the pedants section and moan....