(Parenthetical)

I have a deep-seated love of parentheses. It comes from my writing style being very stream-of-consciousness. I write the way that I think, and I think very much the way that I would speak. Or, perhaps it is the other way around; I speak very much as I think. So much so that I am sure that I sub-vocalize as I write, and even when I’m just thinking. It leads to other things, like talking to myself. I know it makes me sound crazy, but the monologue is already in my head, why not let it out.

I’m starting to digress, so I’ll try to get back to my point. I digress a lot. I do this because my mode of speech (and think) includes a lot of little asides and points of interest. I have to regularly stop and say something relevant, or irrelevant, or interesting, or pointless. So I drop a set of parentheses and put my aside in them, and then continue on my way.

I’m not the only one to do this. In fact, the more stuff I read on the Internet, the more I see this as a common trait among bloggers, and posters of all stripes. It’s gotten so bad, that it is almost anticipated that daily I will come across something that I dread: a set of nested brackets. As much as I love to use them, I try not to nest them (God knows that I fail sometimes). I just can’t stand them, they make the words just that much harder to read.

Types and Purposes

We are blessed by technology. In the days of typewriters it was hard to find punctuation that suited your basic needs, let alone your esoteric ones. Mechanical constraints and design limitations meant that it was not uncommon to be left with the bare minimum of punctuation marks. Quite often, typists would have to do without even such commonplace staples as the exclamation mark. We, however, have 101(+) key keyboards that contain more punctuation that we know what to do with. They even include 4 different types of brackets.

Each type of bracket has specific purposes within writing. They also have many specialized purposes across varied disciplines (although this itself may be another essay). Triangle brackets < > are used primarily in technical writing and special cases. Curly brackets { } (or chicken lips, as programmers occasionally term them) derive from math, and are (fortunately) seen little in the world of words. Square brackets [ ] show up as a multipurpose editor's tool, editing quotes and containing all sorts of bibliographic information.

This leaves only the poor parentheses to hold all of my asides and inner-most thoughts. Well, that's not entirely true. I could use the trusty double dash – the em dash – to isolate my ideas. Except that I've always felt that the dash brings out and emphasizes an idea, where the parentheses subdue and stifle the idea into an ignorable aside.

The problem is the aside within an aside. These are confusing and, for the most part, unnecessary. I've found that, with a careful amount of self editing, many of my asides can be worked into my main stream of thought. I manage this by re-organizing sentences, putting in comma breaks, and sometimes just deleting meandering and useless junk. This makes my ramblings easier to read, and reduces my overall use of parentheses.

Everyone can do this. No more should there be needlessly complicated and recursive writings. Simple reduce, reorganize, and relocate your parenthetical ideas and no more will you find yourself putting a bracket within a bracket. Leave the nested brackets for math and programming. Make your English easier to read.

I'm addicted to parentheses, but I'm recovering. Well, I'm trying (really!).