It’s an argument I’ve had (to my shame) a few times over the years. Personally, I prefer to use no initial space when I want to use three dots to convey a tailing off… (like that, see). But I use the standard space-dotdotdot-space to indicate that something has been omitted from a quotation (like this … ). However, many people choose to use both the opening and closing spaces in all instances.

It came to a head at Emphasis today, when we decided we needed a definitive ruling. Of those in the office who had an opinion, a slim majority felt there was a place for the space-free version.

I put the question out on Twitter, and used Storify to collate the responses. Click here to see what we decided.