Q. I’m editing an e-newsletter in which the emailed page includes the first few lines of each article, ending with a link that says “Read the full article.” In some (not all) cases, the first few lines of the articles end in the middle of sentences. The designer has inserted ellipses in these cases. (Example: Congress passed legislation that . . . Read the full article.) No words are omitted—but I can’t think of anything better than ellipses. What do you say?
A. Ellipses are a good idea here; they are commonly used to indicate a sentence purposely left incomplete. Please see CMOS 13.55. In any case, if the shortened teasers are produced by software that inserts the dots automatically after a set number of characters, objecting to them might be pointless.