Grammar 101 – Dashes and Parentheses
Let’s start with dashes. To begin with, a dash is not the same thing as a slash, even though they rhyme. A slash is a diagonal line that goes from bottom left to top right. It looks like this: /. One that goes the opposite direction is called a backslash. A dash is made by putting two hyphens together with no spaces in between. In fact, there shouldn’t be a space between the dash and either the word that comes before it or the word that follows. Most word processing programs will join the two hyphens together automatically for you, turning them into one, big seamless line.
Dashes usually show emphasis. They proclaim that what lies between them is important and worth knowing. This text-separated off by dashes like this-is important for the reader to have. Used in this way, dashes come in pairs, because you’re setting off that comment in the middle of the sentence as being very important. The first dash tells you to start paying close attention, and the second dash tells you that the really important stuff is over. Notice that if you remove the dashes and the text between them, what’s left is a perfectly good sentence.
Dashes can also be used one at a time. Once again, this usually means that the thing after the dash is of significance. In this way, it’s not unlike a colon. Just as a colon can be used to introduce a single item or thought of great importance, a dash can handle the same thing. It looks like this:
There was one thing that he hadn’t remembered for his trip-the map.
In a situation like this, a colon is as good as a dash. It’s really your choice. Personally, I like dashes because they seem (to me) to indicate speed and urgency while a colon looks more formal. However, if you’ve been using a lot of dashes, a colon is probably a better choice. Dashes lose their power if they are overused.
You can also use a dash for an abrupt interruption of a thought. The dash in this case shows that the topic is changing very suddenly and that the reader needs to switch gears as quickly as you did. Here’s an example:
“I need to get to the store as quickly-no, I need to find my car keys.”
Since the speaker of that sentence jumped to a different topic very quickly without really pausing, the dash shows, more or less, the thought process. This is one of the reasons I think dashes represent urgency. If they didn’t show something happening quickly, they’d have a name that didn’t also mean, “to run fast.”
Dashes can also be used to indicate what is called an appositive, if that appositive includes commas. What’s an appositive? That’s a fine question, and I’ll do my best to answer it as plainly as I can. An appositive is a noun or noun phrase, usually placed right next to another noun or pronoun, which explains what it is next to. An example should make it clearer:
The boy, my cousin from Iowa, fell down the hole.
The phrase “my cousin from Iowa” is an appositive that defines and explains the noun “boy.” Without the appositive, it could be any boy, but that phrase indicates precisely whom we are talking about.
So, dashes set off appositives that contain commas. Still clear as mud? Let’s look at an example:
The three houses-the blue one, the green one, and the one between them-were recently painted.
That sentence would be difficult to understand if we separated that appositive phrase off with commas. The dashes clarify it, showing where the phrase starts and stops, and helps the reader identify the three houses in question. In a way, this is very much like the first use of dashes in that it clarifies important information for the reader, and shows that information in a way that makes it important in the reader’s mind.
Now on to parentheses. I said at the beginning that these are the opposite side of the same coin as the dash, and for the main use of dashes, this is absolutely true. Parentheses, like dashes, set off a bit of the text to keep it apart from the rest of the sentence. But where dashes show importance, parentheses do the opposite. They show that the text inside them isn’t critical for understanding, but might be worth knowing. Let’s look at a pair in action:
My house (in Illinois) has an attached garage.
As with dashes, the sentence should work by itself without what’s inside the parentheses. In this example, it’s not important for you to know where my house is to understand that the garage is attached. It’s just a little bit of extra information that might be interesting or worth knowing. Whether or not it’s valuable is up to you as the reader.
Because parentheses always enclose a bit of bonus information, you always need two of them. If you have one on the left, you have to have one on the right to enclose it. The best way to remember this is to look at the punctuation marks themselves. With only one, it’s a half circle. It’s unfinished. You need the other one to make the circle complete. In fact, this is a good way to think of them-the stuff inside the parentheses are, in a sense, circled off from the rest of the sentence.
It’s the punctuation that goes with parentheses that make them difficult. Do punctuation marks go inside or outside? That depends on how you are using them. Essentially, you punctuate the sentence around the parentheses as normal, then deal with what is inside them as kind of their own sentence. Let’s look at a few examples.
A parenthetical comment inside another sentence doesn’t take any punctuation, even if it’s a complete sentence.
My dog (she’s a mutt) drives me crazy.
“She’s a mutt” is a complete sentence, but, because it’s inside the parentheses in the middle of a sentence, it doesn’t get a capital letter or punctuation.
Remember when I said you should punctuate the sentence as normal, then worry about the parentheses? Well, when you have a situation where a parenthetical comment comes right where you’d put a comma, you put the comma outside the parentheses, and to the right. Here’s what that looks like:
In the winter (my least favorite season), it snows like crazy.
Without the parentheses, you’d still need a comma. So in this case, the comma goes to the right of the parenthetical comment.
If a parenthetical comment appears between sentences, the punctuation goes inside the parentheses. It looks like this:
I don’t like birds. (I especially don’t like cockatiels.) Naturally, we have three of them.
The period goes inside, because the parenthetical comment isn’t a part of any other sentence. It stands on its own, so it needs to be punctuated on its own. And because that punctuation is part of that comment, it goes inside the parentheses.
There are two final things you need to know about parentheses. The first is that a single one is called a parenthesis, although some people (including me) call just one a paren. It’s a verbal shorthand. However, since they always appear in pairs, you won’t need just one.
There are also rare cases where you need to make a parenthetical comment inside another parenthetical comment. This gets ugly quickly, but you can do it if you really wish to. In this case, rather than simply stacking parentheses, you use square brackets for the inside comment. Here’s an example:
I need to go shopping (at the drugstore [I hate that place]) for cough medicine.
Should you need to make additional comments inside a comment that’s inside another comment, switch back and forth between parentheses and brackets. But seriously, you shouldn’t do that because it gets hard to read and keep straight. Find a different way to do it.
That’s all you need to know (at least about dashes and parentheses) for now-but there’s still more punctuation out there.
