Parentheses, Brackets, and Braces
How to tell the difference between these marks and when to use them.
There’s quite a bit of confusion surrounding these separation marks and their many variants, so I wanted to take a look at some of them and help sort them out.
In general, parentheses (singular parenthesis) and their siblings are used in pairs to demarcate or otherwise set off words and pieces of text from the main body of the sentence. In the example I just wrote, plain parentheses surround the words “singular parenthesis” because those two words are a bit of extra information that isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence.
Statements like this that add extra information about the subject of the sentence are called parenthetical statements because they are in parentheses.
More Uses of Parentheses
Another use of parentheses is to set off information that is not only non-essential to the subject of the sentence, but also doesn’t relate to the point of the sentence at all. Here’s an example:
- Bananas (America’s favorite fruit) are best eaten green.
The phrase “America’s favorite fruit” is not only unimportant to the meaning of the sentence Bananas are best eaten green, but it is completely irrelevant to…
