Ellipsis

Let me tell you some of my feelings regarding various punctuation marks.

(You say that sentences makes me sound like a freak. I say it makes me sound like an editor. Potayto, potahto.)

I like em-dashes. They're bold; they make a statement. They provide a clear separation between clauses, but in a way that still shows their unity and togetherness. 

I like semi-colons for the same reason. Sure, they're a little less showy, but a well-placed semi-colon can be the difference between two choppy independent clauses hanging out in the same vicinity and two independent clauses that strengthen and support one another. 

Commas are okay. Mundane and maybe a bit boring, but also necessary to maintain proper flow and division and all that jazz. Commas may not have the same artfulness as em-dashes and semi-colons, but they have their place, and they maintain structure, and I like them for that. 

Ellipses are not my cup of tea. They're hard to use in a clever way, in my personal opinion, and they indicate trailing off or hesitance or uncertainty. They're kind of clunky and ugly, if punctuation marks can be ugly. (They can.) 

If I were to consider my entire life one big long, Hemingway-inspired sentence, you'd find in it loads of commas and a healthy smattering of semi-colons, em-dashes, and other punctuation marks. But you'd only find one ellipsis, I think. The very condensed version of the sentence of my life might go something like this:

"Madeline came into the world scowling, and she scowled and smiled in equal measure while growing up in a loving family; she enjoyed learning and had a relatively successful run in high school, after which she went to BYU for four years to get a college education, and then she graduated; after graduation she had an amazing internship at Deseret Book and then . . . " 

My life's metaphorical ellipsis is right now. There have been pauses in my life plan, yes, but never ones this pronounced or profound. None that truly felt like my plan was trailing off into oblivion. I understand that life isn't always fluid or constant, but this amount of hesitation in the story is disconcerting. It's as though the author penning my sentence has forgotten what comes next or has gotten bored with the story and wandered away for a bit. 

It's hard being an ellipsis when it feels that everybody else just had a quick little comma or a more pronounced, but oh-so-exciting em-dash. It's hard watching my friends and family make future plans and realizing that I'm not as able to make plans for a few months from now, because I have no idea where I'll be living or what I'll be doing by then. I guess I kind of always thought that college would end with an em-dash—it'd be dramatic, it'd be a change, but it still clearly led somewhere exciting. 

There are things I want to do with my life. I spent a long time in denial about what I really want to do professionally, and now that I've identified what my goals are, it's even more frustrating to be ellipsising (yes, I just made that up) through the part of my life that should be spent making those goals a reality. I want to work at a publishing house. I want to get a master's degree. I want to live in an big city and open myself up to novel opportunities. I want to travel. I want adventure. 

But I'm not doing any of those things. I'm just treading water (I accidentally typed dreading instead of treading just now. Significant? Probably.) in the place I've been for almost five years, working at a job that doesn't get me any closer to the career I want, and generally being frustrated at the job market and the faceless hiring managers across the country who just don't seem to recognize that I'm awesome, goshdarnit, and that I'd be a great addition to their company. 

I'm over this whole ellipsis thing. I'm so ready for my sentence to gain a little momentum. I just want some words thrown in there to get this puppy moving forward.

And I'm open to pretty much every punctuation mark known to man—just please, please, please, please no more ellipses.