The Ins and Outs of Parentheses

By Abby Reynolds

Most Common Mistakes:

1. Forgetting to enclose the parenthetical material with a final, closing parenthesis mark.
2. Placing a concluding punctuation mark incorrectly

What’s Wrong?

• They came from as far as Hawaii (which was my idea) to as close as the community college. (source of quote)
• The website; simply decorated in green with easy to find links and a picture of (an old historic building the library) and a tree during foliage as four “eager” college students make there way to class in the 17th century. (source of quote)
• Some statistics would be student to teacher ratio, average classroom size (theses two statistics must be important to the colleges because on every visit I went on or any information I read about a college those were always mentioned), and the percentage of graduates. (source of quote)
• Two of the boxes show teachers helping students (always a good thing to see on a view book,) the others are sports pictures, students sitting as a microphone, cheerleaders, and a choir singing. (source of quote)

My Translation:

Parentheses seem to be used for side thoughts that the writer puts down on paper as he is writing. The information placed inside the parenthese doesn’t seem to be as important as the rest of the words, but it does add explanation to the meaning of the essay or story. A lot of times they are over used, and could be explained in an entire different sentence.

Corrections:

Error: The website; simply decorated in green with easy to find links and a picture of (an old historic building the library) and a tree during foliage as four “eager” college students make there way to class in the 17th century.

Correction: The website; simply decorated in green with easy to find links and a picture of an old historic building (the library) and a tree during foliage as four “eager” college students make there way to class in the 17th century.

Explannation: In this sentence they shouldn’t have added the parentheses at all, because there sentence makes no sense with what the sentence is talking about.

Error: Some statistics would be student to teacher ratio, average classroom size (theses two statistics must be important to the colleges because on every visit I went on or any information I read about a college those were always mentioned), and the percentage of graduates.

Correction: Some statistics would be student to teacher ratio, percentage of graduates and average classroom size. These two statistics must be important to the colleges because on every visit I went on or any information I read about a college those were always mentioned.

Explanation: The parentheses weaken the structure of the sentence by making the central observation seem like an aside.

Error: Two of the boxes show teachers helping students (always a good thing to see on a view book,) the others are sports pictures, students sitting as a microphone, cheerleaders, and a choir singing.

Correction: Two of the boxes show teachers helping students (always a good thing to see on a view book), the others are sports pictures, students sitting as a microphone, cheerleaders, and a choir singing.

Explanation: The comma goes outside of the paretheses, not inside it.

The Rules for Parentheses

Rule 1. Use parentheses to enclose words or figures that clarify or for an aside
Rule 2. Use parentheses to enclose numbers of listed items in a sentence. Ex: When I went on a picnic I took three items with me, (1) Basket, (2) Food and (3) blanket.
Rule 3. Periods go inside parentheses only if an entire sentence is inside the parentheses And if there is another sentence that follows that one.
Rule 4. Use parentheses to enclose supplemental material, minor digressions, and afterthoughts.
Rule 5. If the material within the parentheses appears within a sentence, do not use a capital letter or end mark to punctuate that material, even if that material itself completes the sentence.
Rule 6. If the material within your parentheses is written as a separate sentence (not included within another sentence), punctuate it as if it were a separate sentence and therefore you would drop the parentheses.
Rule 7. Do not forget to end your parenthetical phrase with an end parentheses mark.
Rule 8. The end punctuation always goes outside of the parentheses.

**More helpful steps in finding when you are using parentheses correctly or not, you could read aloud your paper to someone else and see if they are needed, press CTL-F and type in parentheses and the computer will automatically correct them for you, and you can have someone else read your paper and make corrections.

Tricks for the Trade:

If the material is important enough, use some other means of including it within your text, even if it means writing an entire other sentence. Parentheses tend to de-emphasize text whereas dashes tend to make material seem even more important. Therefore if you can avoid using parentheses try using some other way to make the text seem more important.