Bracketed Ellipsis

A bracketed ellipsis is an ellipsis inside square brackets, used to make it unambiguous that the omission from a quotation was made by the editor, not by the original writer. It is the standard convention in scholarly editing, especially of texts where the original itself contains ellipses used stylistically: Céline's novels, for example, are full of authorial ellipses, and an unbracketed cut inside a Céline quotation would be indistinguishable from the author's own three dots.

The bracketed form is recommended by MLA, by Chicago's academic style, and by most textual-editing traditions. It occupies more space than a plain ellipsis and slightly slows reading, and that friction is the point: the reader is made to notice that the writer, not the source, has done the cutting.

For a quotation that already contains an ellipsis, the bracketed form is essentially mandatory; for a quotation that contains none, either convention is defensible, but a piece should use one form consistently. Mixing bracketed and unbracketed cuts within a single essay leaves the reader unable to tell what the marks are meant to signal.

Common mistake: using a bracketed ellipsis to shorten a quotation and then failing to check that the shortened version still makes the point the source made. The mark tells the reader that material has been dropped; it does not exempt the writer from the duty to drop only material whose absence does not change the meaning.