Daily Inspiration Quote by Bill Walsh

A stylistic scold disguised as a gentle reminder, Walsh's line is really about power: who gets to control a speaker's meaning once their words leave their mouth and land on a page. Ellipses are the editor's most tempting tool because they look neutral - just a little typographic fog - while quietly announcing that something has been removed. Put them at the beginning or end of a quotation and you're not merely tightening; you're rewriting the frame. You turn a quote into a fragment with an implied before-and-after that the reader can't verify, inviting suspicion that the missing material is doing all the real work.

The intent here is practical: keep quotes honest and readable. Starting with ellipses often signals, "I parachuted into this sentence midair", which makes the quoted person sound incoherent or evasive. Ending with them creates a cliffhanger that can smuggle in drama, uncertainty, or menace that wasn't there in the original. Both are shortcuts to tone manipulation.

The subtext is a defense of editorial humility. Walsh is warning against the performative transparency of ellipses - the way they can function as a fig leaf for selective extraction. In an era of pull quotes, social snippets, and outrage-baited partials, the line reads like a small rule with big moral ambition: if you have to amputate context, do it cleanly. Paraphrase, set the scene, or choose a fuller excerpt. Don't let three dots do your argument's dirty work.