Ellipsis
From TechWriter Wiki
An ellipsis is a grammatical construct where one or more words in a sentence are omitted because the sentence can still be understood without them. Normally this is done in parallelism in lists, to avoid using the same word(s) more than once.
- Note:
This should not be confused (for the purpose of this discussion) with the typographic ellipsis symbol (...) which is used to indicate that words have been omitted.
For example, the sentence:
The first task to complete is laying the foundations, the second is building the walls, and the third is installing the roof.
actually uses an ellipsis. The full sentence would be:
The first task to complete is laying the foundations, the second task to complete is building the walls, and the third task to complete is installing the roof. (Emphasis added to identify the missing words in the first example.)
With an ellipsis it is important to ensure that the missing words could still be inserted into the sentence and it still make sense. It is a common mistake to use incorrect parallelism, leading to a faulty ellipsis.
Examples:
| Incorrect | Correct |
|---|---|
| Attendees are discouraged from coming and going to the auditorium during the presentation. | Attendees are discouraged from coming from and going to the auditorium during the presentation. |
| OSX is as good, if not better than, Windows. | OSX is as good as, if not better than, Windows. |
