How To Use Commas And Parentheses
The use of parentheses indicates that the writer considered the information less important almost an afterthought.
How to use commas and parentheses. If material in parentheses ends a sentence the period goes after the parentheses. He gave me a nice bonus 500. You could choose to punctuate a parenthetical phrase within a sentence with commas or em dashes rather than parentheses. 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. 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. Whatever the material inside the parentheses it must not be grammatically integral to the surrounding sentence. Commas could have been used in the first example. The example below illustrates this point. Using commas for a parenthesis.
Peter cleaned his room before going out to play basketball. Parentheses always used in pairs allow a writer to provide additional information. In general you can think of parentheses commas and dashes as a continuum of marks. The parenthetical material might be a single word a fragment or multiple complete sentences. Thus commas should be used with parentheses only if the sentence would require a comma without the parentheses.
Commas can be used to separate a parenthesis from the rest of the sentence. Let s start with those quiet parentheses. Parentheses aren t the only punctuation option for parenthetical expressions. Text set off by parentheses is not necessarily grammatically connected to the rest of the sentence. A colon could have been used in the second example.
Like some other punctuation marks parentheses are used in prose to set apart some text in a sentence such as an explanation observation aside or digression. Commas and parentheses are often used together but they serve separate purposes within a sentence. If parentheses are used around an area code they are also static though today most writers omit parentheses around area codes. If it is the sentence must be recast. 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.