Punctuation

Q. My author is using the last half of a sentence in an epigraph. He begins it with three dots and a lowercase word. Does this violate the general rule not to use ellipsis points at the beginning of a quotation?

A. It does violate the general rule. But a general rule by nature may be broken for a good reason, and clarifying a sentence fragment used as an epigraph sounds like a good reason.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]