Using the ellipsis mark to limit quoted material

Ellipsis marks (. . .) allow you to keep quoted material to a minimum and to integrate it smoothly into your text.

To condense a quoted passage, you can use the ellipsis mark (three periods, with spaces before, after, and between) to indicate that you have omitted words. What remains must be grammatically complete.

Lane acknowledges the legitimate reasons that many companies have for monitoring their employees’ online activities, particularly management’s concern about preventing “the theft of information that can be downloaded to a . . . disk, e-mailed to oneself . . . , or even posted to a Web page for the entire world to see” (12).

The writer has omitted from the source the words floppy or Zip before disk and or a confederate after oneself. The phrasing also makes it obvious that material has been omitted at the beginning of the quoted passage (the quoted passage is not a complete sentence).

On the rare occasions when you want to omit one or more full sentences, use a period before the three ellipsis dots.

Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, points out that “by 1987, employers were administering nearly 2,000,000 polygraph tests a year to job applicants and employees. . . . Millions of workers were required to produce urine samples under observation for drug testing . . .” (22).

Ordinarily, do not use an ellipsis mark at the beginning or at the end of a quotation. Your readers will understand that the quoted material is taken from a longer passage, so such marks are not necessary.

The only exception occurs when words have been dropped at the end of the final quoted sentence. In such cases, put three ellipsis dots before the closing quotation mark and parenthetical reference, as in the previous example.

Do not use an ellipsis mark to distort the meaning of your source.

Exercise: Integrating sources in MLA papers 1

Exercise: Integrating sources in MLA papers 2

Exercise: Integrating sources in MLA papers 3

Exercise: Integrating sources in MLA papers 4