I’ve noticed that the “Select Sentence with Whitespace” command does not seem to recognize ellipses (…) as punctuation marking the end of a sentence.
For example, in a passage such as:
“I thought I had understood everything… But I was wrong.”
When using this command within the first sentence, Scrivener selects both sentences instead of stopping at the ellipsis.
Would it be possible to make this command recognize ellipses (both the single ellipsis character “…” and three consecutive periods “…”) as sentence-ending punctuation, just like a full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark?
This would be particularly useful when working with literary texts, where ellipses frequently mark the end of a sentence.
I’m sure there are regional and institutional differences, but in my experience the ellipses on its own definitely does not terminate a sentence in all cases, and most often can be found in the middle of them (particularly informally, in fiction and dialogue, where it can be used to express pauses, hesitation or changes in train of thought).
Maybe this is changing? I don’t know, when I look at your example I see one sentence with a capitalisation mistake (that really stands out to me), not two. Without the stylistic use of ellipses, that would be typed as, “I thought I had understood everything, but I was wrong”, no? Well, I suppose there are no rights or wrongs when it comes to things like this, and maybe you mean that example in a way I’m not reading well.
In quotation, where they are used to make areas of the original that have been removed, they can even mark the start of a quotation, embedded within a sentence, and in most style guides I’ve seen, if the ellipses coincides with the end of the sentence (i.e. we are snipping text all the way to the end of a sentence and no further), then it should terminate with four dots, like so….
Why have the four-dot formation unless the three-dot use is ambiguous?
Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply, and for all the work you put into Scrivener!
I should probably have mentioned that I write in French, where typographical conventions are somewhat different. In French, an ellipsis consists of three dots, and when it marks the end of a sentence, no additional full stop is required.
Of course, I understand your point: ellipses can also indicate hesitation or a pause within a sentence, in French as well as in English. Their function depends on the context.
Perhaps one possible solution would be to offer an optional setting in Scrivener’s preferences, allowing users to choose which punctuation marks should be treated as sentence endings by the “Select Sentence with Whitespace” command, depending on the language they write in.
But I also realise that this might be an unnecessarily elaborate feature for such a specific use case, and I would completely understand if you felt it wasn’t worth implementing.
In any case, thank you again for taking the time to consider my suggestion, and for your continued work on Scrivener. It’s a wonderful tool for writers!
Do a project replace of ellipsis with three periods. Then after, replace three periods with ellipsis.
Alternate way for the developers:
This becomes an advanced configuration variable.
Sentence semantics end marker (Used by Select Sentence, …)
. period
? question
! exclamation
… elipsis
.” period closing quote (selection includes quote.
?”
!”
…”
and so on. It would help with people who use funny punctuation for various things. e.g. internal thoughts in my present book are ~thought~ with it all in all lower case, and italics. So in that case Select sentence would need to look for ~whitespace
That’s a good point! It isn’t even consistent in all formal uses of English, whether to use four dots or three, for example. Some even don’t want you to use the three-dot character, and instead space them out with non-breaking spaces. . . like that (APA). That kind of messes up the sentence selector too (at least on Windows).
Well one thing to know is that this, along with a few other commands in that Select menu are meant to expand if you use them more than once. The selection itself, the right edge of it, becomes the “cursor” for the next selection attempt. While normally you could use that to select the sentence following the one you just selected, for cases where it “misses” and selects part of a sentence it misunderstood, it might just finish off the selection you wanted.
If you are used to typing ellipses, you might try getting in the habit of typing (in Scrivener) an ellipsis followed by a period to indicate the sentence-ending use of an ellipsis. You can have in the Replacements pane of Compile, a standard replacement set to replace each instance of that sequence with a simple ellipsis.
Not as good as Scrivener’s Select command being language sensitive, but it’s something.
Yes, this would be a useful improvement. Scrivener should ideally recognize both “…” and “…” as sentence-ending punctuation, especially for literary text.
Except, as already pointed out, ellipses (and their triple-dotted bretheren) are only sometimes terminal punctuation. So, Scrivener should not really be treating them all in either way. What one really needs is a way of marking these two kinds of uses differently when typing.
Given the way Scrivener now works, the obvious practice would be to type three-dots for terminal uses (which Scriv recognizes already as such) and the ellipsis character for non-terminal (which SCrivener already recognizes as such). A standing Replacement on compile could convert the one to the other in either direction, depending on which uniformity was wanted in the final output.