The case for the missing …
The late Ken Duxbury was an experienced and resourceful small boat sailor and a very engaging writer about his exploits, but he did have one habit I hoped to persuade him out of as I prepared his 1970s Lugworm trilogy for reissuing a few years ago: he would all too frequently end a sentence, generally at the end of a paragraph, with an ellipsis (…) as if to signal consequences of the foregoing events. I felt that for the reader (this one, anyway) this quickly became tiresome. Forget the dots and give us the credit for, and the satisfaction of, working it out for ourselves! Ken went along with this, and as a result his writing seemed crisper and more assured. His wife B told me ‘Thank goodness, I’ve been telling him about that for years!’