Ellipsis

It occurred to me a while ago now that one of the most interesting features of internet discourse is the rise of the ellipsis. Particularly the trailing ellipsis. If you read message boards, comment threads, forum posts, blogs and the like you will see dozens upon dozens of occurrences of this - sentences, paragraphs or posts ending with ' ... '. What it all adds up to, to my mind, is a rather nasty form of intellectual laziness. It's almost always used to hint "well, this is obviously not the WHOLE of my brilliant idea, I have much more, but I simply can't be bothered to write it all down, so I'll stop here, leave a few dots to encompass the rest of the post, and go do something more interesting". Which is really a bit of an insult to the reader. The next time you're thinking of ending a post with ... , stop. If there's really nothing else to the post that you're leaving out, why use the ellipsis? Just use a good old period. If there _is_ more that you're leaving out, then do the world a favour, and write it down.