CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.2b

ELA8th GradeConventions of Standard English

The Standard

Use an ellipsis to indicate an omission.

Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts

Teacher's field guide

What Students Need to Do: Students shorten quoted material by replacing omitted words with an ellipsis. They keep enough context to preserve the source's meaning and make the shortened quotation read clearly.
What Mastery Looks Like: Students can place an ellipsis exactly where words were removed from a quotation. Their shortened quotation remains grammatical, keeps the original meaning, and follows the assigned spacing style.
Common Misconceptions: Students often use an ellipsis to show any pause rather than missing words from quoted material. They may delete words that change the writer's meaning or leave the sentence ungrammatical. They may also type too many or too few dots.
How to Assess It: Give this source: "The school garden, which opened in April, now supplies herbs to the cafeteria." Ask students to remove "which opened in April" and punctuate the shortened quotation.

Lesson moves

Give groups sentence strips from a short passage; they remove one nonessential section and replace it with a three-dot ellipsis card.
Ask students to compare a full quotation with a shortened version and write whether the omission preserves the writer's meaning.
Play Ellipsis Editor: pairs earn a point for each correctly shortened quotation and another point for explaining what was omitted.
Have students select a long quote from a news article and shorten it for a mock school newsletter without changing its meaning.

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A ready-to-print activity worksheet aligned to CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.2b, with an answer key for the teacher on its own page. No account needed.

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