This is what I was going by. If the ellipses are mid-sentence, I would use a space after the ellipses, but it makes less sense if it’s the actual start of the title. It’s more common in my experience, too.
The article gives inconsistent examples, for example:
" Journey to the Land of… Enchantment
Greatest Hits Live … and More"
Given after each other, without commenting on the use of punctuation being different and why it should be different. So I didn’t pay much thought to that part of the article, as it doesn’t clarify anything about spaces, just makes it more vague and uncertain.
That is more reasonable. But again, we are either going but what is more “correct” (I have to write “correct” in scare quotes, I think you know what I mean) or what is symmetrical, this is not necessarily the same thing.
On those examples, I also don’t understand them, I think it may be a mistake, because it doesn’t really go with what they say right above it. But notice that to make that argument you need to ignore all the examples with ellipsis starting the title, which are very consistent (and what we are discussing), only look at the title-ending examples, which are inconsistent (and that we aren’t discussing), and say “let’s be symmetrical with that”.
For ellipsis in the end of phrases, in general (and ellipsis ending a sentence aren’t rare, unlike ellipsis stating them) if the ellipsis ends a sentence, it doesn’t need a space (like other sentence-ending punctuation). If it indicates a pause, an interruption, an omission, then it does. It’s the same principle. And the point of the lower case here was that the word doesn’t start the sentence.
This seems the most popular choice, and I can live with it, but I still don’t understand the logic here.
Following the AP or CMOS (which the article refers to) use of ellipsis is pretty uncommon in titles in general. The example “Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter” given in the English guidelines would be “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter” or “Bring Your Daughter . . . to the Slaughter” following these style guides.
I think the relevant part of the article is comparing capitalization to other common examples, given that we’re not following these style guides on ellipses in general. The goal of the language guidelines is to standardize the most commonly accepted way of writing song and album titles.
I think the reason that this isn’t a popular choice is that we don’t really use print for spacing of ellipses in any other case. It’s not explicitly written into the style guidelines (it should be!), but guess case changes “A…a” and “A … a” to “A… a”. Thus, most releases follow this in other cases and not what’s printed.
Yes, it would. Few agree with CMOS position of adding spaces between every dot, but the space before and after each ellipsis is pretty standard in most English style guides. I don’t think we need to go and change all titles immediately, but if we are trying to follow the most standard English style guides, that’s the correct way to write it. But even if you ignore the rule about ellipsis in the middle of sentences, you almost always have a space after an ellipsis in any case.
True. But the argument people are making for lower case at the beginning of a title with ellipses (including both me and you) is that it should be treated as the middle of a sentence, so we need to look at how ellipses are styled in the middle of sentences. Something that that article is also very consistent with.
Because if we’re changing the MB style guide to follow a “standard” English style when deciding the capitalization of words in titles beginning with ellipsis, it makes sense to apply them to the space also. But, personally, I really understand your argument, it’s the half-and-half that confuses me.
Joking aside, all the style guides I’ve seen seem oriented on how to use them when you’re editing someone else’s words… not something that I think comes up much for MB.
Instead, in a title llke “Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter” the ellipsis indicates the tonal shift is being highlighted by a dramatic pause.
I see ellipses being used in titles more as what the style guides call “less common” uses - trailing off, pausing or partial sentences. More literary uses, as it were. So we should just use what’s on the cover/tracklist/whatever.
I don’t know what guideline having two ellipsis in a title would override - the issues in this thread are i) should the first letter be capitalised after an ellipsis, and 2) should there be spaces around ellipses.
I don’t think two ellipses is banned or anything… certainly the original version of the track has them:
Well, style guides are for anyone having to deal with style. Many (probably most) European languages have organizations tasked with defining the correct spelling, punctuation, style etc. But we don’t have an “Académie Anglaise”, instead we have a number of private companies trying to compete with their incompatible style guides. In English, the closest to a standard we have is “most/all authoritative style guides agree on this”. I deal with this professionally and know how maddening it is. I certainly don’t have the style guide to rule them all — we just deal with what we have,
And to be clear, I accept any consensus here, I would accept “just follow what’s printed” if that’s what most people agree. I just thought the most popular option was inconsistent with itself, and that was really confusing me.
I actually don’t have anything in principle against two ellipses if it’s intentional. But looking at the artwork here, I think the intention is to have the title in two lines, the ellipsis in the second line is a continuation of the one on the first line. As we don’t support titles with two lines, I don’t think it makes sense to have two ellipses. In the same way, in some languages, if you already have a hyphen at a line break, then you repeat the hyphen in the second line. But you wouldn’t have two hyphens on just one line. If you find official artwork with the title in one line and two ellipses, that would prove me wrong.
Edit: I just went through the releases looking at the artwork, and the CD releases have the title in just one line… with only one ellipsis. See here.
I don’t think that’s an unreasonable argument, but there are releases where it’s on one line with two ellipses, so for the purposes of what do do with ellipses, would you say that if the track were to have two, it should be written as:
I think style guidelines are mostly important when there are printed inconsistencies.
When there are no printed inconsistencies, or very littel, we can follow what is printed.
Except casing guidelines, that should be always applied (per language).
I’m okay with specifying a style for this if we think there should be one, but we should then mostly agree on it Guess case currently changes “…and something” to “… And Something”, which I would personally be happy with unless we know there’s artist intent involved, but I see this topic is one of those bikeshedding issues where it’s hard to get people to agree.
Right now, 73% of the voters seem to agree on lowercase. The spacing is the more controversial part, currently 58% of the votes are for options without a space.
The poll question is different (proposing a new guideline), so that can’t be compared to the edit (changing a title based on interpretation of current guidelines or lack thereof). Several editors who voted yes on that voted differently here. Also, there’s just 3 editors who voted something other than abstain on that edit that didn’t vote on this poll, not 6.
For sure, but I feel strongly that the guidelines should say something. Even if the high-level guidance around ellipses were just, “preserve the as-printed spacing and capitalization of the initial word”, there needs to be a “preferred” form for cases when sources are inconsistent or the title is written in all-caps on the cover.
I’ll shut up about this now, but not before throwing out a few more (private) polls in a last-ditch attempt to move this forward.
How strongly do you feel about whether words like “and” and “of” should be capitalized after a leading ellipsis?
I have a strong opinion about what the guidelines should say.
I mostly just want the guidelines to clearly state how this should be handled.
I think the guidelines are fine in their present form.
These options do not capture how I feel.
0voters
How strongly do you feel about whether a space should or shouldn’t be inserted after a leading ellipsis?
I have a strong opinion about what the guidelines should say.
I mostly just want the guidelines to clearly state how this should be handled.
I think the guidelines are fine in their present form.
There must be 15 work titles in the world that start with ellipsis, so I think it would be detrimental to add a paragraph of text for each such small cases in the already long Style/Language/English title guidelines.
When it says first word must be capitalised, it’s quite enough for me:
Always capitalize the first and last word of a title. This rule should be followed even if the words would normally be lowercase according to the other rules.
And, as there is nothing about punctuation, then we just don’t change what is printed (no spaces added nor removed).
The English guidelines are way too short if anything. This is not a very uncommon example either.
15 titles ever? Have some concrete numbers instead. MBz search is useless for this, so I’m using another database.
Metal-Archives has 384 releases (0.07% of all releases in their database) that start with “… and” or “…and”. This is just 1. the metal genre (MA 536,468 RGs vs MBz 2,932,959 RGs) 2. album titles 3. one of the several words that would normally be lowercase in our English guidelines.
This definitely needs to be in the English guidelines and standardized. A title starting with ellipses is not rare in music titles, and even if it’s just around 0.01% release and recording titles here that are English and start with ellipses, that’s over 3000 titles that the guidelines do not cover.
I think important forum discussions affecting site policy is hidden from most users too, but come on. 15 out of 20 votes from active editors is not something you should just dismiss. It’s the most reliable editor consensus we have on this right now. I’m not sure how trying to gauge approval for guidelines is getting people to give up on the forum, but I don’t want you to elaborate since it’s a red herring.
The multiple ellipses question is running a bit of topic, and it’s hard to say without an actual example. But in general, I think we should apply the same rules, if it is in the middle of a sentence and implying a long pause, it would have spaces on either side. But I would suggest leaving this aside for now, this topic is messy as it is.
One interesting thing is that when I was looking for good examples of recording with multiple ellipses (the search failed me there), I noticed there’s actually already a good number of recording with leading ellipses, in several languages, and most of them with a space before the ellipsis and lower case for the first word. That surprised me, I thought this was quite rare and that I was arguing against the majority. There may actually be a consensus about this in MB, it’s just that most users aren’t checking the forums
Guess case currently changes “…and something” to “… And Something”, which I would personally be happy with unless we know there’s artist intent involved, but I see this topic is one of those bikeshedding issues where it’s hard to get people to agree.
20 people voted. Do we have the stats for how many people edited on the forum in that same 5 day period?
