yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Parentheses | Punctuation | Khan Academy


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Hey grammarians, hey Paige, hi David. So today we're going to talk about parentheses. So before we get into what parentheses do, I would like to talk very briefly about the word origin of parentheses, or parenthesis, because it comes from Greek. So "para" means besides, and "thesis" means placing, right? So it’s placed beside, approximately.

How we use parentheses is we kind of put them to the side for a little, what are called the "sides" in writing, little interruptions. So let's lay out the functions of parentheses, and I should say the singular form of parentheses is "parenthesis." That's just one of these; two of them is "parentheses." Like so.

So Paige, what is a parenthesis and what does it do?

So a parenthesis is a piece of punctuation that has kind of a lot of different functions. It can indicate remarks by the writer of a text, okay, or specify a definition or a reference. It can also show interruptions by an audience. But, sort of overall, the parenthesis separates a piece of technically unnecessary information, or what we call an aside, from the rest of a sentence. So it separates inessential information, right? You can take out what's in the parentheses, and the sentence will still make sense.

All right, so let's take these one at a time. All right, so here we've got something like: "the cookie, which was still warm, was delicious." Now we could conceivably take that out of the sentence, right? Because the sentence is basically "the cookie was delicious." But if we wanted to add an additional remark by a writer, you know, which is whoever ate the cookie, namely me, we would put in this parenthetical remark, right? It's some extra information.

And when I say parenthetical, I'm talking about this little aside here; that's what I mean by a parenthetical. So this is what's called a parenthetical aside.

So the second way in which you use parentheses is to specify a definition or reference. So let's say I wanted to quote Paige's as yet unwritten autobiography, okay? So what I'm doing here is I'm using this parenthetical aside to cite where in her book she said, "Oh no, a tiger." So let's say this is a—what I'm doing here, this sentence is like an excerpt from some essay that I'm writing about Paige's life and times, which I've italicized here because it is a book, right?

So what I'm doing here is I have the quote, and then in order to say where that reference comes from, I give the author's last name, the name of the book, and then page 38. And all of that is inside parentheses, like so. That’s the second use of the parenthesis.

So let's say you’re taking down a transcript of a speech. You’re typing up someone’s speech, and they start coughing and it interrupts the way they’re giving a speech. Let’s say I was trying to render the sentence: "Furthermore, I must firmly state that..." Right? So you can include the coughing right in the sentence when you’re writing it down or transcribing it.

Like if we think this is important enough to note, we can just sort of say, "Yep, coughing happened here." I see.

So those are the uses of the parenthesis. You can indicate remarks by the writer, as in our first example, or specify a definition or a reference, which we did here with a reference to my book, or you can show an interruption in speech.

That's it, sweet! So what happened with that tiger? That’s a long story. All right, we'll talk about that later. You can learn anything. Dave out. Paige out.

More Articles

View All
Rob Riggle Ice Climbing in Iceland | Running Wild With Bear Grylls
BEAR GRYLLS: OK, Rob. Your front points– your crampons are your main weight-bearing things. Good lord. BEAR GRYLLS (VOICEOVER): Comedian Rob Riggle and I are in a race against time, searching to find a case of supplies before nightfall. But first, we’ve …
How to Keep Your Child Learning & Happy! at Home
Hello! Thank you for joining us today. We know how busy you are as parents of young children, particularly during these times with so much going on in the world. We want to make the session a really valuable use of your time, so we’re going to jump right …
Work is the set of things that you have to do, that you don't want to do
What would you say the key differences are between success and failure? What does one startup have versus one that doesn’t make it? Uh, luck is a big one. Timing is everything, but you kind of make your own luck, you know, if you stay at it long enough. …
Guided meditation for high school students
Welcome and thanks for joining me on this, let’s call it a voyage of the mind. So before we begin, posture and breathing make a big difference in meditation. So if you’re not already on a nice firm chair with your back straight, pause this recording and g…
The (Second) Deadliest Virus
Few of the monsters that evolution created have been so successful at hurting us as the variola virus, responsible for smallpox. The carnage it caused was so terrible and merciless that it compelled humankind, for the first time, to act truly globally. It…
Daylight Saving Time 101 | National Geographic
In spring, we move our clocks forward an hour, and in fall, we move them back an hour. That section in between, we call that daylight savings time. And oh, it’s singular; sorry, I mean daylight saving time. It may seem pretty straightforward, but daylight…