How To Use Commas And Parentheses

Commas and parentheses are often used together but they serve separate purposes within a sentence.

How to use commas and parentheses. 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. 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. He gave me a nice bonus 500. How to use not abuse parentheses by erika suffern.

The example below illustrates this point. The use of parentheses indicates that the writer considered the information less important almost an afterthought. Commas can be used to separate a parenthesis from the rest of the sentence. Parentheses always used in pairs allow a writer to provide additional information. 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.

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. If material in parentheses ends a sentence the period goes after the parentheses. A colon could have been used in the second example. Parentheses with complete sentences in some cases an entire sentence might be added to a paragraph within parentheses.

Using commas for a parenthesis. Peter cleaned his room before going out to play basketball. You could choose to punctuate a parenthetical phrase within a sentence with commas or em dashes rather than parentheses. Text set off by parentheses is not necessarily grammatically connected to the rest of the sentence. 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.

Thus commas should be used with parentheses only if the sentence would require a comma without the parentheses. If parentheses are used around an area code they are also static though today most writers omit parentheses around area codes. 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. Let s start with those quiet parentheses. Commas may be placed after the closing parenthesis but not before either the opening or the closing parenthesis.