[General] Can't find any ellipses in 'In quoted material'

[kadioguy]

Why can't I find any ellipses in the following? Does anything wrong?

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In quoted material

Ellipses are most useful when working with quoted material. There are various methods of deploying ellipses; the one described here is acceptable for most professional and scholarly work.

The following examples are based on a paragraph from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.


from http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/ellipses.html

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

You have to keep reading. The part you're looking at is the complete text. If you continue reading, you'll see examples of how elipses should and shouldn't be used when quoting parts of that paragraph..

 

[kadioguy]

Thank you. Another question:

What does 'that if ...' mean? Why not just write 'if ...'?

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

There's nothing wrong with the "that." But you're right. Especially with the colon, it isn't needed. The sense of it is:

- I learned that if one advances confidently . . . .

Remember that English has simplified over time. During Thoreau's slower time, using a lot of verbal flourishes was a sign of a thoughtful, educated mind.

That's why this is a good paragraph for demonstrating how to use elipses. There's so much that can be cut out!

 

[kadioguy]

Remember that English has simplified over time. During Thoreau's slower time, using a lot of verbal flourishes was a sign of a thoughtful, educated mind.

Could you tell me what 'During Thoreau's slower time' means?

Does it mean the slower pace of life of Thoreau​?

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(update) Charlie Bernstein later told me the following:

Does it mean the slower pace of life of Thoreau​?

Almost. I meant that Thoreau's era had a slower pace. It's not that Thoreau led a slow life. Actually, he a busy guy. He wrote, traveled, observed, and worked on causes he believed in.

But his times were slow. It took weeks or months for news to travel. If you sent a message to someone just a few miles away, it could take all day to get there and another day to get an answer. There was no electric light, so the day ended when the sun went down. Something as simple as getting a loaf of bread meant more than just running to the grocery store and back. You had to bake it.

And traveling from one town to another was a major undertaking, so most people traveled only rarely and a lot people never traveled at all.

So when people wrote, they tended to take their time and say more. That was fine, because readers spent more time reading, too. No one phoned, emailed, or texted, so no thoughts were reduced to LOL or OMG. Writers used a lot of adjectives, adverbs, and dependent clauses. Brevity was a sign of laziness.

Wordy was good. Run-on sentences were expected. Charles Dickens was paid by the word, so it takes forever to read some of his books. Critics disliked the British writer Robert Louis Stevenson because he wrote so simply, clearly, and concisely. His books didn't become popular until the twentieth century - a more fast-paced time.

So it's easy to take something Thoreau wrote and shorten it with elipses.

 

[GoesStation]

Could you tell me what 'During Thoreau's slower time' means?

Does it mean the slower pace of life [STRIKE]of[/STRIKE] during Thoreau's lifetime?

Yes.