Dramatic Ellipsis



"Dot dot dot!"

- Stinkoman, Homestar Runner

In writing, particularly in a... pulp thriller or a comic strip... caption, a... portentous Dramatic Pause is represented by writing in... an ellipsis (...).

Sentences may also be... ended with an ellipsis for a tension... building or ominous effect... . This version can be used on the back of... books, a commercial summary of movies of... varying quality, etc. This version could also be used by people who intend to sound... mysterious in a piece of fiction (or intending... to sound like... William Shatner), or by someone who is giving an... important clue while... dying, and is unable to finish the sentence to its vital point... before meeting mister Grim... .

...At times, a sentence can also... begin with an ellipsis to represent... hesitation—or, as mentioned in the beginning, simply a... dramatic pause.

Note: Bear in mind that the use of... three dots in an ellipsis is... theoretically invariable: one does should not simply use however many.......................... dots one likes—but.. a lot of people will anyway... .

Another Note: An ellipsis does not mark the end of a sentence; rather one should follow it with a space and then the closing punctuation. Like so... ? Yes, like so... ! Or like so... . Four consecutive dots without a space would usually be considered incorrect typology.

Yet Another Note: If a trope example is about a pause in spoken dialogue, without any direct reference to an ellipsis, it likely should not go here but rather under Beat, Dramatic Pause, and / or Melodramatic Pause.

More Notes: In all technicality, an ellipsis has a space before each period, making the correct form of an ellipsis like this. . . But no one actually does that...

Compare... Visible Silence, Beat.

Not... to be confused with... Dot Dot Dot.

Anime ... and ... Manga

 * Thanks largely to the Golgo 13 video game for the NES, Duke Togo is famous for doing this.
 * Also strange is the common manga method of ending a dramatic sentence in '... !', which, of course, seems to mean that they stopped talking, but it got really dramatic towards the end.
 * There are not one but two versions of this: the "... ?" which indicates confused silence, and the "... !" which indicates shocked silence. A "... ?!" would probably translate to dumbfounded silence ....
 * The use of dramatic ellipsis in the manga of Soul Eater had actually left Nenena of Livejournal (who makes sure to comment about the upcoming chapter and describe its general plot with the occasional tangent, such as her plan to capture the Memetic Molester of the series) with a mild case of Post-traumatic stress disorder to where she actually screamed about the abuse of ellipsis.
 * And it was taken to truly absurd heights in Ch 95, where 84 of them get used in one go.
 * At about midway through Samurai Deeper Kyo, the author started noting that Kyo, the main character, seemed to be losing popularity, then he realized the Kyo at that point in the storyline had been losing a lot of battles and rarely had anything to say about it aside from "...".
 * At one point in Yu Yu Hakusho's Three Kings Arc, a group of characters have a conversation by writing things out so another character cannot here them. At one point, one of them simply writes out "..." Another chastises him, saying not to write that out. see around 0:34
 * Humorously lampshaded in the official Viz English translation of Rurouni Kenshin. During a side arc, Kenshin and gang are following young Yahiko around to see why he's acting weird. At one point, Kenshin does the dramatic elipsis of silence, and gets kicked in the head by Sanosuke, who yells Whaddya mean '...'!?"

...Comedy

 * Victor Borge with his Phonetic Punctuation routine ... that is, punctuation as exaggerated onomatopoeic sounds.

Comic Books
"The Nostalgia Critic: STOP! USING! ELLIPSES!"
 * It happened almost all the time in The Trigan Empire: "And then ... it happened!" or "And then he saw ... IT!" (It being a huge, hairy yeti thing if this happens on land, a Loch Ness-type monster if on the sea, or a huge, lime-green octopus-thing if under the sea. And not just once for any of those, either.)
 * Most notoriously appears when comic-book villains introduce themselves. "Fools! No one can stop ... Doctor Deathinatorwhatever!"
 * Double hyphens were also popular for this on Marvel titles in the '60s, which looks even stranger.
 * Warrior #1 used these to ridiculous proportions, so much so that Spoony commented on it during his and Linkara's review of it, which eventually resulted in ...


 * Zero Patrol #1 uses this a lot as well, leading Linkara, during his review of it, to coin the phrase "Ultimate Warrior's Ailment" for comics that have too many ellipses (named for Warrior#1 and ... its ... ellipses).
 * The closest Snake Eyes gets to vocalization in the G.I. Joe comics is this trope.

Fan Fiction
""WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!" It was...............................................................Dumbledore!"
 * My Immortal uses these to distraction, invariably with far more dots than the regulation three. The most infamous and Egregious example:


 * Out of character? Nonsense. He simply had a headache
 * Starkit's Prophecy also uses ellipses to distraction.

... Film ...
"Narrator: "His post-junk libido, fueled by alcohol and amphetamines, taunted him remorselessly with his own unsatisfied desire, dot, dot, dot.""
 * Trainspotting's lead/narrator Ewan McGregor provides a rare film-based specimen:

"Mel Brooks, as the piss boy, as King Louis XVI "But, dot dot dot, you don't understand!""
 * History of the World Part One also has a spoken ellipsis:

Literature

 * In Terry Pratchett's The Truth, Otto is explaining how things should be said in Überwald (complete with sound effects from thunder, wolves, etc.): "Yonder is ... zer castle".
 * The castle in this case being known as Dontgonearthe Castle. Any pun in a storm, I always say.
 * Similarly, in Going Postal,  explain to Moist that you can't refer to...   as simply  . It needs the pause for effect.
 * And in Night Watch a character refers to having '... business interests in Uberwald' and Vimes refers to this statement as 'significant pause type of business interest', in the same vein as a character in The Truth being threatened with, in their summary of the others words which included an ellipsis, 'deep pause trouble'.
 * Another example: in Thief of Time Lu-Tze is informed by his unlikely rescuer that he is in ... the dairy. Of course, it's a very special dairy.
 * In Craig Shaw Gardner's Cineverse Cycle, this is Big Bad Doctor Dread's overused shtick. To the point that, when one of the people sneaking through his fortress stops: "Did you hear someone talking?" "Worse than that. I heard someone... hesitating."
 * Not used outright in R.A. Salvatore's The Legacy, but Bruenor does think that General Dagna is pausing for dramatic effect when he doesn't immediately say what "trouble" they found in the new tunnel.
 * Used at least once per page in Maria Trapp's A Family on Wheels, the sequel to The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.
 * Twilight abuses both these and dashes-though mostly the dashes- in places they don't belong. Like.... here- and back there.
 * Used stylistically throughout Logan's Run, Logans World, and its successors.

Live ... Action ... TV

 * Lampshaded once in a Scrubs episode, in which J.D. is forced with shaving his hair for a cancer patient. He's quite reluctant to do this, so he stalls by telling the family, "You know, I've got a thing to get to now, but when I get back- * Pause for effect ... pause for effect ...* I'm shaving this thing."

... Music ...

 * A staple in Megadeth's albums, like Peace Sells ... But Who Buying? They stopped using it for a while after Countdown To Extinction, but brought back it back in the The World Needs a Hero album with the song "Recipe for Hate...Warhorse".
 * More recently, there's "The Hardest Part of Letting Go...Sealed with a Kiss". And besides album names, there's a couple of not-title-tracks-song names, like "Holy Wars...The Punishment Due".

... Theatre ...

 * An in-text example for the ABBA musical Mamma Mia!!: when reading Sophie's mother's diary to try and find the identity of her real father, Sophie's friends wonder why all the entries involving going out with a guy end in "Dot-dot-dot." Sophie, who is by now familiar with the diary, concludes "Well, that's what people did in the olden days!"

Video Games
"Alexander, God of Destruction: Ellipses are for CHUMPS!"
 * StarCraft: Pops up sometimes in the subtitles, particularly in  death speech.
 * Nippon Ichi game Makai Kingdom has several characters using all versions of the trope. At one point, one character sees the ellipsis in another characters' speech bubble, and declares:


 * ...Detective Badd of Ace Attorney Investigations... likes to use these... frequently.
 * In fact it's rare that he manages to complete a sentence without them.
 * It may be because he sucking on a lollipop while speaking. He speaks normally when he takes it out.
 * The player character in Phantasy Star Portable elevates this to an art form.
 * Happens often in Iji. This is parodied by the Scrambler device, which usually renders ellipses as "Dot dot dot".
 * At the end of System Shock 2;

"Battler: And then...I...knew. (while a quick montage of images from previous episodes are shown)"
 * Done multiple times in Umineko no Naku Koro ni. In fact, a lot of Visual Novels would fall under this trope, but Umineko's use of ellipses can be quite... egregious at times.


 * "........." is Alucard's catchphrase in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
 * When battling Red in Pokémon Gold and Silver, his dialogue consists of nothing but this in a homage to his Heroic Mime status in the previous games.

Web Comic

 * Adorable Desolation has them here and here
 * Little Worlds uses them frequently in the earlier pages of the comic.
 * The zombie of Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name doesn't have a name, so he's often written as {...}, and the author refers to him as ellipsis.
 * Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff overuses, abuses and elongates ellipses spectacularly as part of its Stylistic Suck shtick. It could be said that............it HASS the ellilipses

Web Original

 * One Protectors of the Plot Continuum story has a character in the medical department refer to a session of therapy involving videos designed to discourage lusting after canons as "... debriefings." PPC agents being what they are, the one going through these sessions describes them thereafter as "ellipsis debriefings."
 * As the page quote shows, this was parodied in a Homestar Runner short, where Stinkoman actually pronounces it as "Dot Dot Dot".
 * Linkara calls this "Ultimate Warrior's Ailment" after a really dreadful comic he and Spoony reviewed. (See "Comic Books") It seems to be common in Liefeldian 90s comics.
 * In its second blooper reel, Dragon Ball Abridged's Piccolo: "Dot-dot-dot. Ellipsis."

Western Animation
"Daggett: "I am a, dot dot dot, trainspotter!" Norbert: Transplant."
 * Daggett in Angry Beavers would do this pretty often, like when he's reading the note Stump left before running away to find his real parents.

Also... there's one... more thing... I need... to address...

...

STOP! USING! ELLIPSES!