Common_Errors_in_English_usage

ELICIT/ILLICIT
The lawyer tries to elicit a description of the attacker from the
witness. "Elicit" is always a verb. "Illicit," in contrast, is always an
adjective describing something illegal or naughty.
ELLIPSES
Those dots that come in the middle of a quotation to indicate something
omitted are called an "ellipsis" (plural "ellipses"): "Tex told Sam to
get the . . . cow out of the bunk house." Here Tex's language has been
censored, but you are more likely to have a use for ellipses when
quoting some source in a paper: "Ishmael remarks at the beginning of
"Moby Dick," 'some years ago . . . I thought I would sail about a
little' ­­a very understated way to begin a novel of high adventure."
The three dots stand for a considerable stretch of prose that has been
omitted. If the ellipsis ends your sentence, some editorial styles
require four dots, the first of which is a period: From the same
paragraph in Moby Dick: "almost all men . . . cherish very nearly the
same feelings. . . ." Note that the period in the second ellipsis has to
be snug up against the last word quoted, with spaces between the other
dots.
Some modern styles do not call for ellipses at the beginning and ending
of quoted matter unless not doing so would be genuinely misleading, so
check with your teacher or editor if you're uncertain whether to use one
in those positions. It is never correct to surround a quoted single word
or short phrase with ellipses: "Romeo tells Juliet that by kissing her
again his 'sin is purged'" (note, by the way, that I began the quotation
after the first word in the phrase "my sin is purged" in order to make
it work grammatically in the context of the sentence).
When text is typeset, the spaces are often but not always omitted
between the dots in an ellipsis. Since modern computer printer output
looks much more like typeset writing than old­fashioned typewriting, you
may be tempted to omit the spaces; but it is better to include them and
let the publisher decide whether they should be eliminated.
An ellipsis that works perfectly well on your computer may "break" when
your text is transferred to another if it comes at the end of a line,
with one or more of the dots wrapping around to the next line. To avoid
this, learn how to type "non­breaking spaces" between the dots of
ellipses: in Word for Windows it's Control­Shift­Spacebar; on a Mac,
it's Option­Spacebar. When writing HTML code to create a Web page, make
a nonbreaking space with this code:  
EMAIL/E­MAIL
Although the spelling "email" is extremely popular, many people prefer
"e­mail," which follows the same pattern as "e­commerce." The "E" stands
for "electronic."
EMBARESS/EMBARRASS