Ellipses and other Emendations of Quotations

When you remove material from text, you must show that you have done so by using ellipses. Any time you change a text, you should put the change in brackets (not parentheses) in order to signal that you have done so.

When the text omitted comes out of the middle of a quotation:

Peter Walsh revels in the idea that "the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained [ . . . ] the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light" (79).

The ellipses show that the omitted material is no more than a full sentence.

If it were four dots, the reader would understand that there was a full sentence omitted, e.g.

Whitman ends his epic poem with images of his body diffusing into the world he loves: "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. [ . . . .] Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged [ . . . ] I stop somewhere waiting for you" (1339-1346).

When the text omitted comes out of the beginning of the author's sentence:

If you remove text from the beginning of a sentence, you don't need to use ellipses because the first word of the quote will be in lower case, indicating that you have omitted some text, e.g. As he shops with Hugh Whitbread, he thinks he should find something for Clarissa, but "still Richard [is] torpid" (113).

When the text omitted comes out of the end of the author's sentence:

This is the most common area of citation that is neglected. You must indicate with ellipses when you are citing material from a sentence when the sentence is not finished, e.g. As Septimus lies on his sofa, he feels the light of the world "[g]oing and coming, beckoning, signaling [ . . . ]" (139).

Even though in the text a comma follows the last word in the citation "signaling," you don't include it, because you aren't including the clause before which it indicates a pause. Notice that the first word in the quotation here is placed in lower case; it is so because the quotation should flow from your own sentence and you never have a capital letter in the middle of your sentence.

Making the tense of the quotation fit your own present tense analysis: You must maintain a consistent tense in your paper, even when you quote from a writer who is using past tense. Make the citation fit your tense, and show your changes with the use of brackets:

Septimus Warren Smith dreams of Miss Pole and "[writes] poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink [ . . . ]" (85).

Note that in the first verb of the citation, the verb tense is changed within brackets. That is the present time of the text being cited. The second verb "corrected" remains in past tense since it's in the past of the novel. The idea here is to use your own sense of past and present of the text in question to judge whether a verb should be amended to the present tense.

Showing the pronoun’s referent in brackets: Often you will cite a quotation that uses a pronoun to refer to an antecedent that comes earlier in the text. Since you're taking it out of context, you must show the referent either in your introductory sentence, or in brackets, e.g. "'Evans!' [Septimus] cried."

The amended word here was "he," which would be meaningless to a reader unless the antecedent were given

Notice also that the single quotation marks are used for a quote within a quote.