Parentheses, Brackets, and Braces

Today Bonnie Mills helps us talk about three punctuation marks: one you undoubtedly know how to use, another you possibly misuse, and yet another you’ve likely never used. If you’ve ever wondered when to favor parentheses over square brackets and when to stick in a pair of curly braces, read on.

Parentheses

You’re probably well versed in the basics of how to use those sideways eyebrow thingies, better known as parentheses, but the details can get tricky. 

First, remember that a pair of them is called “parentheses,” but a single one is a “parenthesis.” 

For now, let’s just say that parentheses mainly enclose information that isn't vital to a sentence. You may want to review the episode in which we compared parentheses to dashes and commas because dashes and commas can separate things that aren't vital to a sentence too, but the different ways of setting off information do have differences, but no matter what you put inside parentheses, one important thing to remember is that your sentence still has to make sense if you delete them and everything inside. And although you are allowed to put both partial sentences and complete sentences inside parentheses, you shouldn't put more than a whole paragraph inside, according to Garner's Modern English Usage. (1) 

One thing people often wonder is how to use terminal punctuation marks with parentheses. If your sentence starts with an opening parenthesis, and what’s inside your parentheses is a complete sentence, then the terminal punctuation mark, such as a period, question mark, or exclamation point, goes inside the closing parenthesis: “(I knew he wouldn’t want to do that.)” 

On the other hand, if what’s inside the parentheses is only a partial sentence, then you put the terminal punctuation outside instead, for example, if you wrote, “I moved to America when I was 10 (in 1980).”

For the most part, these two rules seem fairly easy to understand—complete sentence: terminal punctuation inside; partial sentence: terminal punctuation outside. But when you have a sentence that contains another complete sentence within parentheses, the punctuation can get confusing. Let’s say you want to add the complete sentence “I can’t believe it...

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