Lesson 2: Grammar and Punctuation

Dashes and Parentheses

Dashes are a popular but somewhat informal way to introduce and conclude asides within speech, eg: "He says he missed the train - as he usually does - and that's why he was late." They can be used to replace semi-colons in non-list situations, eg: "They only had blue ones - I don't know when they'll be getting other colors in." You should avoid using dashes in your more formal business letters.

Dashes are distinct from hyphens, although they look much the same. Hyphens are used in some composite words (eg: 'go-between') and between some words which function to produce a single meaning when they appear as a pair (eg: 'self-interested'). They are also used to indicate when a long word has been broken up in order to make it fit between two lines of text. You will not normally need to break words up like this when you are writing using a word processor, but if you do it's important to remember that you should only ever split a word between syllables (units of sound which can be pronounced separately).

Parentheses (brackets) provide a useful way to make asides and tangential remarks when you don't want to use footnotes. Ideally, you should keep information in parentheses brief. Footnotes are useful for longer asides, but you should bear in mind that people may not always bother to read them. Information contained within parentheses may feature the full range of punctuation marks, but it should be self contained. (It's possible to enclose an entire sentence in parentheses, when it expresses something tangential to the rest of the paragraph in which it is situated.)

If you end a phrase in parentheses with a period, question mark or exclamation mark, you don't need to make the next word outside the parentheses the start of a new sentence. Any punctuation which is part of the phrase within parentheses should also be enclosed by them, so that, as we have seen above, an entire sentence in parentheses has its period (or other closing mark) before the final bracket, not after it.

Parentheses can also be used when you want to include information without placing much emphasis on it, eg: "I may be slightly late for the meeting (I have to collect my sister from the train station)."

Nested parentheses are sometimes necessary when explaining complicated matters, especially technical matters, but they should be avoided wherever possible.

Sometimes parentheses can be used to enclose a single letter. This is most often seen when alternative versions of a word are possible depending on the context in which something is read, eg: "I look forward to receiving your contribution(s)." This example allows for circumstances in which there may be one contribution or many.

  1  2  3  4  5   

Print this page