In Defense … of the Ellipsis

Here is what happens in 1930 to the first sentence of 1926: very little, almost nothing. There are some small changes to punctuation, as when “arm chair” acquires a hyphen. In a sentence that is governed in its opening lines by the (somewhat confusing) play of light and dark, Woolf avoids a minor repetition when she writes “what wastes and deserts

” and it’s hard to think of a verbal array whose structure better mimics both its subject and the larger text of which it’s part: precisely because, despite its exquisitely shaped adventure, the sentence finally fails to hold itself together.

On using ellipsis (“…”) in quotes: If your’e omitting a few words within the sentence, you can use … to omit. But if you’re omitting a sentence or more, you put brackets around your ellipsis […]. Seems like a subtle thing, but modifying quotes can be pretty important. So often, I see people dropping 200-300 words quotes, when really, they should be