I used to use them very frequently. It took noticing that I was parenthesizing the second half of almost every sentence I wrote (to add a bit more info, like this), to make me go back and evaluate if I could remove them and replace with commas, or just break the sentence. I found that it was possible on almost all cases. Since then, I started doing this automatically as I started writing a "(" and then I kind of naturally stopped using parentheses so much. It was a bad habit that I somehow formed and found a means to self-correct.
That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#12One of my pet peeves is people opening a parenthesis and never closing it. It's like my brain pushes the parenthetical into a stack and when I get to the end of the paragraph it throws an error.
I definitely overuse parenthesis and I haven't found a way to rid myself of the habit (as I managed to mostly rid myself of the habit of using semi-colons).
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#13I just had thw thought: aren't parentheses just punctuation denoting an inline footnote?
In legal writing, an inline footnote begins with the word "see" in italics, e.g.,"football-related prayer in public schools is now permitted,see,Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist., 597 U.S.507 (2022)." It's just as easy to make this a footnote but some judges have objected to "excessive" footnotes in legal submissions. Keeping them inline avoids this criticism.
ps On another note, AI legal hallucinations are a solved computing problem. Either a cite or case is contained in the closed universe of materials or it isn't--a simple binary question. Problem is, thos with control of the materials, starting with 1 Dallas (which predates the United States) won't share the list with AI companies.
pps This forum deletes unicode. The word see was gobbled from the original text.
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#14"He was certainly a flamboyantly creative writer and inspired teacher; yet one can take him seriously here: “Pricks” performed “tricks” as punctuation became a vehicle to think about the technological revolutions of the time, gender relationships, and literary genres reflecting social and historical concerns like kingship or geographical exploration."
absolute trainwreck.
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#15No Amount of Grammatical Feats Will Make You Look Smart If You Use Word Capitalization.
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#16You can't escape them.
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#17Five comments here write "parenthesis" where they mean "parentheses" ... weird.
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#18One of my pet peeves is people opening a parenthesis and never closing it. It's like my brain pushes the parenthetical into a stack and when I get to the end of the paragraph it throws an error. I definitely overuse parenthesis and I haven't found a way to rid myself of the habit (as I managed to mostly rid myself of the habit of using semi-colons).
Re: That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
#19One of my pet peeves is people opening a parenthesis and never closing it. It's like my brain pushes the parenthetical into a stack and when I get to the end of the paragraph it throws an error. I definitely overuse parenthesis and I haven't found a way to rid myself of the habit (as I managed to mostly rid myself of the habit of using semi-colons).
https://xkcd.com/859/
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