Oh-Oh. My wife is shaking her head as she is reading. Not a good sign. Especially since she is proof-reading my weekend story.

She puts her teacup down and picks up the I-pad. With just a couple of finger swipes, she has highlighted my whole first paragraph. "This is too technical," she tells me. "It doesn't grab the reader. You can do better."

"It's the prompt," I complain. "I have to get the prompt in at the beginning."

"Do you want my services, or not?" She hands the I-Pad back to me.

An hour later I show her a new and improved version. She is smiling and nodding as she reads. Wait. Is that a frown?

"You tend to write elliptically," she tells me.

I resist the urge to say "no I don't" because the rule is I can't argue with the muse. So instead I say "show me."

Turns out that I do. Those three little dots, that I often use are called ellipses. They turn up in almost every story I write lately. Usually more than once.

"Is that a bad thing?" I ask her. "Because it doesn't get flagged by Grammarly."

"Well, it is definitely something you should be aware of. Look here.." my wife handed me the I-pad. "I think you are supposed to use an ellipsis when omitting a word or phrase from a quote."

       '...at our regular Thursday breakfast, John said, "It's a shame about Aaron's dog..."

       We all waited for John to finish his thought (and tried to remember who the heck Aaron is.)          Rick broke the silence. "Who's Aaron?"

      "You know... Aaron. Lives the other side of what's her name... Betty something."

       "His name is Ron," Rick told him. "Ron lives the other side of Betty."

"So what is wrong with that?" I asked her.

In the opening phrase. Why didn't you just use a period. "It's a shame about Aaron's dog [period]"

"But that is not the way he was talking, He was obviously going to say more. His mouth was still open and he was waving a hand around. I only have five hundred words. I couldn't write all of that, so I ellipsised him. I have to write like this, it's the neighborhood. Everybody around us talks this way."

My wife laughed. "That's because most of them can't get through a sentence without forgetting what they are saying."

"Exactly. That's my point. There should be a punctuation rule that says you can use an ellipsis when the seniors you are writing about pause to gather their thoughts. They could call it a Senior Ellipsis."

Something else occurred to me. "So how did you know that this is called elliptical writing?"

"I know everything. I'm the muse."

"You looked it up. You looked it up and saved it for the next time I did a dotdotdot."

"So what if I did? It is still a valid observation."

"I don't know... It seems like cheating."

You did it again. Right there. Why didn't you use a comma?