Consider the following sentence: The baker may seem to be a gentleman, the butcher may seem to be a rascal, and the candlestick maker may seem to be a fool. Since the verb phrase “may seem to be” is pretty long, I might want to elide “may seem to be”. Can I use gapping commas? … Read more
I’m editing a paper and came across a sentence which uses an ellipsis to separate the main idea from a restatement as follows: The suspicion that the butler committed the murder was just that… a suspicion. My editing experience tells me that it would be better to use a colon: The suspicion that the butler … Read more
I have seen a meme which confuses me: “At 18: Others: have partners, do drugs etc. Me: watches tv and sleeps Is this grammatically correct and does “me” take singular verb form? I have also heard comedians use this. My question is about verb agreement. We say I watch tv and sleep but what about … Read more
The following is grammar question from an English as a second language exam My girlfriend was showing me a copy of the exam she took several years ago after finishing high school. We were looking at the questions for fun, and one question was to pick the phrase that completed the sentence correctly. a. Although … Read more
I’ve searched everywhere, including questions about whether to capitalize after a stutter (no), capitalize after an ellipsis (no if it’s a continuation of a sentence, yes if it’s a new sentence), but they don’t really answer my question exactly. Let’s say I have this line of dialogue “What… what happened?!” Should the second “what” be … Read more
I am citing the play All My Sons in an essay I am writing. I don’t want to have a lot of unnecessary content in my quotes and I am not too familiar with quoting plays, so I want to ask how I should omit lines when quoting a play. P.S. I’m not sure if … Read more
Global temperatures have already risen 0.9℃ and continental temperatures 1.5℃ degrees above pre-industrial levels” This is a sentence from an essay about ice melting and environment changing. It confuses me because the clause after and doesn’t make sense to me: it doesn’t contain any verb and the word degrees is really strange there. It becomes … Read more
I am ‘querying’ an agent… And I would like to keep grammar mistakes and infelicities down to a manageable dozen. So here goes: In the following sentence, “In the story, Gilgamesh is king, and Enkidu lowly beast.” is the second comma necessary? According to the internet, it seems so, and I tend to agree. On … Read more
So I was reading a narrative and I came across an ellipse. I know that ellipses are used sometimes to mark ommissions in a quote, however, what does it mean when it is used between paragraphs – and I’m not referring to quotes paragraphs. e.g. paragraph 1 … paragraph 2 I think it is used … Read more
Should I capitalize the word “don’t” in the following sentence? Listen… don’t panic. Answer No, you do not capitalize the word following the ellipsis. I have only ever seen and used spaces in ellipses in academic writing when omitting text from the middle of a quote. For instance, from the Wikipedia article for linguistic ellipses, … Read more
