How To Use Commas And Parentheses

How to use not abuse parentheses by erika suffern.

How to use commas and parentheses. The example below illustrates this point. Peter cleaned his room before going out to play basketball. Parentheses are the quiet whisper of an aside commas are the conversational voice of a friend walking by your desk and dashes are the yowl of a pirate dashing into a fray. Parentheses aren t the only punctuation option for parenthetical expressions. Commas may be placed after the closing parenthesis but not before either the opening or the closing parenthesis.

Using commas for a parenthesis. The use of parentheses indicates that the writer considered the information less important almost an afterthought. You could choose to punctuate a parenthetical phrase within a sentence with commas or em dashes rather than parentheses. Parentheses are used to give additional information to the reader information that would disrupt the flow of the sentence if written as a nonrestrictive clause. A parenthesis is additional information that is not essential to the meaning of the sentence i e it could be removed it is also possible to use dashes or parentheses brackets to offset a parenthesis.

Parentheses always used in pairs allow a writer to provide additional information. Leave only one line of space 1 between the address and the greeting 2 between the greeting and the body of the letter and 3 between the body and the closing. The parenthetical material might be a single word a fragment or multiple complete sentences. Commas can be used to separate a parenthesis from the rest of the sentence. Text set off by parentheses is not necessarily grammatically connected to the rest of the sentence.

If parentheses are used around an area code they are also static though today most writers omit parentheses around area codes. Commas and parentheses are often used together but they serve separate purposes within a sentence. If it is the sentence must be recast. In general you can think of parentheses commas and dashes as a continuum of marks. Let s start with those quiet parentheses.

He gave me a nice bonus 500. A colon could have been used in the second example. If material in parentheses ends a sentence the period goes after the parentheses. Commas could have been used in the first example. The chicago manual of style online explains that parentheses which are stronger than commas or dashes set off material from the surrounding text adding that.