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Originally Posted by ApK
Funny this should come up. This week, my 14-year-old son commented on a passage in an LM Montgomery book where the author used an ellipsis in narration. He said he had just been taught in is middle-school Honors Language Arts class that ellipses should only be used in dialog.
I disagreed (as, obviously, did LMM).
I can see, however, that there might be stylistic prohibitions against that kind of punctuation use. It seems like it would be a good rule to follow in journalism, for example. I wonder what the various style guides say on the matter.
ApK
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As I remarked in an earlier post, it's fine to break the "rules", provided that you know enough about them in the first place to know when it's appropriate to break them. Eg, we're taught as writers, "don't use sentence fragments", but Dickens put them to masterful use in the famous opening paragraph of "Bleak House":
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London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
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Here, he's using sentence fragments to achieve a particular (and quite wonderful) effect, but lesser writers would still be well-advised to avoid them!