Love the ellipsis? So do we! But an ellipsis can be a touchy, persnickety little punctuation mark. Used in the wrong situation, ellipses can appear overdone, overly dramatic, silly, sloppy, unnecessary… You get the point.

As writers and authors, we may need to ask ourselves if it’s time we push back from the table and analyze our appetite for the ellipsis (or the “dot-dot-dot” as some folks call it). If we overdo it, our writing suffers, but if we learn to use it properly, we can harness the power of the ellipsis in our short stories, poetry, and novels…without being annoying!

So what’s the right way to use an ellipsis for dramatic effect in your writing?

Stymied by pesky punctuation marks and their position in quoted speech or phrases? Does the comma go before the quotes, or after? Does a period go inside quotation marks? And what about question marks—which seem to break all the rules? If you’re writing books, stories, or poems, you need to know the proper way to format dialogue—including punctuation. The rules differ depending on what part of the world you hail from, but if you’re writing for an American audience, here’s the skinny.

Nothing distracts your reader as much as grammatical errors, whether they be misplaced commas, dangling modifiers, or pronoun agreement problems. Perhaps the most noticeable of these errors are sentence-structure errors—sentence fragments and run-on sentences. It is always helpful to have a proofreader, like those at Writer’s Relief, look over your creative writing before sending it out for publication. Here are some tips on how to recognize, correct, and even avoid fragments and run-on sentences.