Category: writing

The Ellipsis Reloaded

Occasionally, I go back through some of my past work (Regarding Avalon, written in 2010??) just to see what I’ve learned. One thing I’ve noticed is that I used to use the ellipsis an awful lot; these days, not so much, though still quite a bit. The other thing I’ve noticed that I have formatted it differently in every book I’ve written.

When I started out, I did what most people do, I just typed in three dots, each one surrounded by spaces.

This is . . . three dots surrounded by spaces

Looks okay, though you have to remember to use hard spaces instead of regular spaces, otherwise the dots might get split across lines when the text reflows. That wasn’t the main problem however; what I dislike about this using this is that the spaces between the dots can grow and shrink, depending on how the paragraph is justified. You could end up with something that looks a bit like this:

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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, you’ll come across a book that will change your perspective on everything: everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard, everything that’s happened before, everything that’s happening now, everything that’ll happen in the future. Once in a lifetime, you’ll come across a book that doesn’t tell you about something you haven’t already seen, or experienced, or at the very least suspected, but puts into a context that’s like a massive strobe light firing off inside your head.

Once in a lifetime, you’ll finish a book that compels you to sit in a dark room for a few hours with a bottle of something strong and NWA playing on a loop, just to make sure you have fully understood what you’ve just read.

For me, Caste is that book.

Being black, I’ve experienced a fair share of overt racism over the years: more than some, certainly a lot less than others, probably an average amount now I think on it; so when a book or article comes along that explores racism, then I’ll take a look (know your enemy and all that). The thing is, Wilkerson isn’t actually talking about racism, she’s talking about caste: a system deliberately created to elevate one group of people while keeping a knee on the neck of another, usually by ascribing an imaginary inferiority of the subordinate group through nothing more than a trait they were born with and cannot change (the colour of their skin, their parentage, their sexual orientation). On the surface, this looks a lot like like common-or-garden racism (or homophobia), so Wilkerson dives straight in and explains the difference:

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