ばよかった… is not ellipsis; you're not leaving anything out (did you mean よかったのに…?)  し… should be fine, though.  You can put です if you want but as long as you're not trying to be especially polite you should be OK.

Years of my Japanese teacher telling us every day that we should always use 丁寧語 and stories about how this one time a Japanese person got mad because someone used だ　got to me, I guess.

Thank

That's when you speak, not when you write.

I write with です and ます and the celebrity blogs I read are also written in 丁寧語。 Still, it's not necessary for everything to be です、 if that makes any sense。　

Also, 。。。 is not ・・・ so watch out for that.

merlin.codex wrote:

I already pointed it out but Lang-8 is not a blog.

And this is in response to what?

kainzero wrote:

I write with です and ます and the celebrity blogs I read are also written in 丁寧語。 Still, it's not necessary for everything to be です、 if that makes any sense。　

Also, 。。。 is not ・・・ so watch out for that.

And ・・・ is not …

As for blogs, many of them are written in です/ます even if they're not celebrity blogs.  I also notice that on nicovideo, while the comments are almost always in plain form, it's very common for the うｐ主's description and comments on his own video to be in desu/masu and even use keigo.

I would add to the above comment that you don't have to write a lang-8 entry like a faux-diary... in fact most entries I've read are not written that way... people write it like a short essay that they expect to be read by a number of people they are not close with... therefore masu/desu would be a natural choice.

as a more relevant example, my japanese friends on facebook always post in teineigo.

with regard to the OP's original question, I think it's just a question of writing style and the ellipse is totally fine in concert with polite language... provided that you use it in a way that feels natural...
(i'm using as many ellipses as possible here to describe this point...)

I should also point out that while I use ellipses a lot in japanese I never use the japanese period to do it (。。。) and rather prefer the more natural feeling english version (...)...

Last edited by dtcamero (2012 July 23, 10:05 am)

I write casually every now and then too, but staying constant is important, so that was my main concern. No issue with using them in casual posts.

(I always use 丁寧語 when answering any comments, though, so it totally applies for that part )

JimmySeal wrote:

I've never used lang-8, but my undersanding was that it's for practicing writing in general.  So if you wanted to practice polite writing, wouldn't you use the polite form in that case?

Exactly.

i was told to use [・・・]

[...] for english
[。。。] is incorrect

Magamo wrote:

Notice how I used "……" in the previous example. This is roughly (but not exactly) the same as the English "..." mark as in "*sigh* I think I suck at Japanese..." Unlike in English, you use 6 dots in Japanese. In squared paper, one box has three dots so that そうか…… takes 5 boxes in total (3 for kana and 2 for ……). Each three dot set is called 三点リーダー. When writing vertically, these dots go in the middle of the box while, as you can see from examples in this post, they're kind of at the bottom of a line when written horizontally. Since you're using square paper vertically, you write three dots so that they form a line passing through the center of the box. In your average Japanese input system, you can get it by kanjifying りーだー. Depending on your system, you might be able to get it from "。" or other symbols too. In any case, always use it as a pair so you get 6 dots in two consecutive boxes

From: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?p … 51#p157451