Three little dots. That’s all that they are, just three little dots. However, I can’t figure them out. To give a little background on this conundrum, I received an email today and the sender kept using these dots in-between their sentences. For example:

“I’ll pick up that later…it shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s meet tomorrow to discuss it…3:00 works for me”.

Now traditionally, these dots can be used to indicate that more is to come, cliff-hanger style. For example, the conclusion of a mystery novel “And the killer is…..”. They are also used as a common convention in software such as Microsoft Office to indicate that further action is required. One example of this is the classic “Open…” option. The problem is that I don’t think the above sentence fits into either of these categories.

There just doesn’t seem to be a real need for them to be there, and they are actually distracting in my opinion. I think that the email would be much more readable if you wrote it like the following:

“I’ll pick that up later, it shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s meet tomorrow to discuss it. 3:00 works for me.”

This flows more logically and is easier to follow in my opinion. Taking a look at the rewrite, it seems that the original author may have been trying to indicate a pause using the three dots. However, if you compare the two samples the comma and breaking up the last sentence conveys this idea better.

In the end, my advice would be to avoid using the three dots all together in your work emails. I can’t think of any situations where they can’t be replaced by a more common and more readable convention such as the comma.