Dot, Dot, Dot ... Why You Shouldn't Overlook Them
The White House released a five-page summary of a July 2019 telephone call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy this morning.
In this summary, Trump repeatedly pressed Zelenskiy to re-open an investigation into a Ukrainian energy company to focus on any involvement by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
At one point, Trump tells Zelenskiy of the Biden matter: "If you can look into it ... it sounds horrible to me."
While the substance of this sentence could potentially be damaging to the President, what stood out to me was White House’s use of ellipsis.
White House officials said they could not explain the ellipses, saying only that they are used when the conversation is inaudible and not picked up by voice recognition software.
Ellipses appeared three times throughout the five-page summary.
While we wait to learn the significance—if any—of the White House’s use of the ellipses in the summary, let’s take this as a learning opportunity about the use of ellipses on the bar exam, particularly on the Multistate Performance Test.
Ellipses refer to a mark or series of marks that usually indicate an intentional omission of a word or a phrase from the original text. The most common form of an ellipsis is a row of three full stops (..., . . . or [...]). Forms encountered less often are: three asterisks (***), one em dash (—), and multiple en dashes (--).
Because ellipses indicate that certain words or sentences have been deliberately removed from a document in the MPT (for example, in the text of a case or statute in the Library section, or in a transcript found in the File section), the information appearing either before or after the ellipses is generally important and should not be overlooked. After all, if the information isn’t important, the examiners would probably have deleted the information and included it as part of the omitted material. So the fact that the information still remains in the MPT document before and after ellipses, that’s significant and shouldn’t be ignored.
