How To Use Commas And Parentheses

The parenthetical material might be a single word a fragment or multiple complete sentences.

How to use commas and parentheses. Text set off by parentheses is not necessarily grammatically connected to the rest of the sentence. If material in parentheses ends a sentence the period goes after the parentheses. Parentheses with complete sentences in some cases an entire sentence might be added to a paragraph within parentheses. He gave me a nice bonus 500. Parentheses always used in pairs allow a writer to provide additional information.

Peter cleaned his room before going out to play basketball. 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. Commas can be used to separate a parenthesis from the rest of the sentence. You could choose to punctuate a parenthetical phrase within a sentence with commas or em dashes rather than parentheses. 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. 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. 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. Let s start with those quiet parentheses.

Commas could have been used in the first example. The example below illustrates this point. How to use not abuse parentheses by erika suffern. Using commas for a parenthesis. Whatever the material inside the parentheses it must not be grammatically integral to the surrounding sentence.

In general you can think of parentheses commas and dashes as a continuum of marks. Like dashes but unlike commas parentheses can set off text that has no grammatical relationship to the rest of the sentence the style guide gives these examples. 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. A colon could have been used in the second example. The use of parentheses indicates that the writer considered the information less important almost an afterthought.