Parentheses When to Use Parentheses in English

We’ve covered most of what you need to know, but I want to address a few more points before I conclude this article. Note that it sometimes might be more appropriate to write a bulleted list, especially if there are more than four items in your list. Parentheses can also be used to add your own commentary to your text as the writer. This can be a great way to bring your text alive and add some humor and personality. turbotax vs cpa Everything I set out to do today (clean the house, fix my car and eat a nourishing meal) was a complete and utter success.

Punctuation and parentheses rules

Applying this to sentences with parentheses can be a little tricky because you must ignore the text within the parentheses. In reverse, an acronym or abbreviation can be provided in parentheses upon its first use, and then used in place of the full term in the remainder of the document. Time zones are usually enclosed in parentheses following the time. There are a few things to know when using parentheses to add asides or additional information.

While some parentheses rules are strict, there’s a bit of wiggle room inside your sentences when you really want to add something. Use parentheses when you want to add extra information that’s not necessary but is still helpful. Make sure that the sentence is still grammatically correct if you remove the text in parentheses. If you want to show the reader you omitted part of a quotation, especially in the middle of a sentence or passage, add an ellipsis between brackets.

1. Try dashes, for instance, or even commas, and see if that works better.
2. We’ve included some examples of brackets so you can see what we mean.
3. According to the APA style, in this case, you will need to create these two levels of enclosure by using brackets inside of parentheses.
4. The next rule applies to parentheses that appear in the middle of the sentence.
5. To avoid this, ensure you only use it when the information contained within it is something you’d be happy to remove.
6. If it’s not a complete sentence, the period goes outside the parentheses.

1 If the text in parentheses is a complete sentence and is separate from surrounding sentences, the period goes inside the parentheses. Additionally, a phrase that could stand alone as a complete sentence can also be contained inside another complete sentence. If it’s not a complete sentence, the period goes outside the parentheses.

When you refer to something that commonly goes by an acronym or initialism, write it out fully and use parentheses to show its shortened version. You have several ways to use parentheses in your writing — some of which are required, and some of which are more for style. You can use parens instead; it’s an abbreviated form of parentheses. The majority of the time, parentheses is the word you want (since you use two at a time). We’ve included some examples of brackets so you can see what we mean.

When & How To Use Parentheses Correctly (With Examples)

In some writing, a person’s year of birth and year of death are provided in accounting and the theory of the firm parentheses when the person is first mentioned. If there is uncertainty about the year, a question mark should follow it. Note that an en dash, rather than hyphen, is used between the years. In general, the most common usage of parentheses is to add asides or unessential additional information. However, there are several other reasons a writer may choose to use parentheses.

Use Parentheses To Define Acronyms

In academic writing, you need to use parentheses for in-text citations. They’re not relevant enough to be their own sentences outside the parentheses, but interesting enough to be included after the main sentence. Also known as non-essential clauses, these parenthetical expressions should be helpful but unnecessary. The sentence should still make sense without the extra information, but it clarifies your meaning. The most common way to use parentheses is to insert extra information in your sentence.

Parentheses vs. brackets FAQs

The first way parentheses come in handy is to provide additional information about the rest of the sentence. Again, this information will always be nonessential but could be something you think your readers might be interested in knowing. On the first use of an abbreviation or acronym that might not be understood by your readers, the full term can be provided in parentheses.

Notice that the comma stays outside the parentheses, in the place where it would have been if there were no parentheses in the sentence at all. Learn more with the difference between brackets and parentheses. The parenthesis is a type of bracket, which when paired with another bracket—[ ]—is used to interject text within other text. Parentheses are prevalent in mathematics, too, where they are used to set off arithmetic symbols as well as numbers, operations, and equations. We encourage you to share this article on Twitter and Facebook.

Because of this, an important word or phrase may be missing from the passage you kept, in which case you could add the missing context in brackets. This rule also applies to exclamation marks and question marks. Aside from their use in grammar, parentheses are also used for in-text citations in the APA, Chicago, and MLA formats. Additionally, if you want to show that a word can be either singular or plural, you can put an s in parentheses at the end of it.

Knowing how to use commas in your writing is important, especially when dealing with parentheses. Because parenthetical text usually relates to what’s directly before it, it shouldn’t follow a comma. However, it’s completely normal to place a comma after parentheses, without a space. By extension, this means the text in parentheses is often a sentence fragment. It also means that subject-verb agreement should ignore anything in parentheses. Here, if we remove the text in parentheses, the sentence still makes sense.

Sometimes, more than one option is appropriate, so it’s up to you to pick the best one. This punctuation mark is often overused, which causes it to lose its effect. To avoid this, ensure you only use it when the information contained within it is something you’d be happy to remove. Look at your sentence and ask yourself, would the sentence still make sense without this information?