Using three dots – an ellipsis – to mean “et cetera” isn’t normal English punctuation.
Category Archives: Punctuation
New speaker, new line
If your text is to flow naturally, typographical conventions need to be observed as well. It’s not just about getting the wording right.
Propagating initial capitals
Where sentences don’t start with a capital for some reason, there’s no need to propagate the need for one until you find somewhere to put it.
(Grand)parents and (sub)contractors
Bracketing off part of a word to express alternatives may be very compact on the page, but it’s not acceptable English punctuation.
A dull-as-ditchwater subject
A dull-as-ditchwater subject, but a not-to-be-missed topic: hyphenation of compound adjectives before nouns.
Lowercase acronyms
English always writes its acronyms in capitals, with just a few exceptions that have escaped into the wild as normal words (such as radar, laser, snafu and scuba).
Money, money, money
English style guides do differ a little about exactly how to format sums of money. But none of them do it the Dutch way.
Decimal points
It’s the kind of thing that ought to belong in Elementary Dunglish but, surprisingly or not, it remains the commonest simple mistake of all.
Advanced Dunglish 