When you incorporate external sources into your writing, you will sometimes want to remove portions of the original quotation, perhaps to maintain the relevance of the quotation to your larger point or to eliminate details that are inappropriate for your purposes.  You may do that, under two conditions:

	you signal the change to readers
	you maintain the meaning of the original

Signal the change to readers with ellipsis marks.  These are three periods with a space between them.

Within a Sentence:  Xxxx space . space . space . space xxxx.

When you remove something from within a sentence insert ellipses, placing a space before the first ellipsis mark and after the last.

Pat McQueeney says, "When you incorporate external sources into your writing, you will sometimes want to remove portions of the original quotation . . . to maintain the relevance of the quotation . . . or to eliminate details that are inappropriate for your purposes."

At the End of a Sentence:  Xxxxxx. space . space . space . space Xxxxxx.

If you are omitting something at the end of a sentence, end the sentence with a period and then follow with a space and three spaced marks.  These ellipses might mean that the rest of the sentence is eliminated, or a whole sentence, or several sentences, or a paragraph.

Pat McQueeney emphasizes this point: "When you incorporate external sources into your writing, you will sometimes want to remove portions of the original quotation. . . . You may do that, under two conditions:  you signal the change to readers and you maintain the meaning of the original."

If you need to add an in-text parenthetical citation at the end of a quotation, put the ellipsis after the quotation (and before the closed quote).  Then add the sentence period after the citation.

Pat McQueeney explains, "When you incorporate external sources into your writing, you will sometimes want to remove portions of the original quotation. . . . You may do that, under two conditions . . ." (345).

At the Beginning of a Sentence

Do not use ellipsis marks to signal material removed from the beginning of a sentence unless the remainder of the sentence begins with a capitalized word.  (In that case, readers might not understand that something has been deleted.) 

Pat McQueeney explains that writers "will sometimes want to remove portions of the original quotation" as they support their thinking with outside research(345).

Single Words or Phrases:  Xxxx "sss" and "sss" xxx.

Because the quotation marks will indicate that something has been left out, there is no need to use ellipses with quoted words or phrases extracted from sentences.

Pat McQueeney emphasizes that writers must "signal the change [from the original] to readers" and "maintain the meaning of the original." 

Notice that the brackets indicate a change--by addition--in the quotation.

NOTE:  Past versions of MLA documentation have required that the marks be put in brackets to indicate that they were not in the original quote.  That convention is fading, and other documentation systems do not ask for the brackets.