Punctuation Practice: Shortening Quotes

I've got another punctuation challenge for you, again having to do with using quotes effectively in your writing.  Quotations are good for capturing an author's tone or an important piece of content, but sometimes they just don't quite work the way you need them to.  Small changes sometimes are necessary so that they "fit."

However, the rule for using a quote is that you have to keep everything inside the quotation marks EXACTLY the same as it appears in the original source.  This makes changing things a little complex.

In this assignment, we'll practice one particular type of change: leaving something out of a quote.  To do that, you'll need to use ellipses, which look like three periods in a row: ...

Grammar Girl has a nice synopsis of what ellipses are and how to use them in a variety of situations.  We're especially looking at the "Using Ellipses to Show an Omission" and the "Don't Use Ellipses to Change the Meaning of a Quotation" sections: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ellipsis.aspx Links to an external site. 

Now, let's try it ourselves.

1. Find a paragraph that uses a quote from your Source Evaluation Essay you submitted earlier.
   
2. Practice inserting an ellipses to shorten this quote in a way that makes it efficient and still meaningful to your reader.
   
3. Submit the entire paragraph, quote with ellipses included, here.  
   

Factors to consider:

• ellipses look like periods, but they don't act like them.  If you need to end a sentence after an ellipses, you'll need to add one more period at the end, for a total of four dots: ....
• It's TERRIBLE to use an ellipses to misrepresent what the original source says.  Changing something from "Lady Gaga laughs at rumors that she eats little girls as breakfast cereal" to "Lady Gaga...eats little girls as breakfast cereal," for instance, is academic dishonesty.  Just like plagiarism, this can end up earning you a zero on a paper.