That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis

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.

One 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).

The one place where I find parenthesis really jarring is in the middle of quotes. I just can't wrap my head around something like

> "I'm sending (via email) an encrypted message", Alice said to Bob

Especially in a book that's been supposedly copy edited. Em dashes or commas or just a plain run-on sentences feel much more appropriate for the general lack of structure in real speech.

I don't like the two examples of parenthesis used in the title & subtitle of this piece, where they put wonderful and perfect in parentheses before a noun phrase.

Putting adjectives in parentheses before a noun (phrase) is, yes, a useful device but those adjectives should usually be words that give more (but not necessary) information, rather than purely subjective qualifiers such as the two that the author uses. I know they're probably being a bit tongue in cheek but it still grates a little that these were the two examples they led with.

I don't know why but I seem to use more parenthesis (even if I should be using commas).

"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.

No Amount of Grammatical Feats Will Make You Look Smart If You Use Word Capitalization.

I just had thw thought: aren't parentheses just punctuation denoting an inline footnote?

You can't escape them.

Five comments here write "parenthesis" where they mean "parentheses" ... weird.

And not a single mention of Lisp? Tsk.

Came for comments with an unreasonable amount of parenthesis; not disappointed.

Now having a revival because AI killed the em dash.