Parentheses | Punctuation | Khan Academy

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.