Grammy Girl here. I'm in Yon Fog Fog, your friendly guide to the English

language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today I'm going to help you decide when

to use parentheses, dashes, and commas.

We'll talk about fun words like my very favorite word,

curfuffle, and we'll end with a familect about nicing.

Have you ever been sitting at your computer writing and suddenly you aren't sure

whether you should use parentheses, commas, or dashes to set off some point or an aside.

It happens to me because in a lot of cases these marks are interchangeable at least grammatically but they each do give your

writing a different feeling. In general you can think of parentheses, commas and dashes as a

continuum of punctuation marks. Parenthesis are the quiet whisper of an

aside. Commas are a conversational voice of a friend walking by your desk, and dashes are the yowl of a pirate

dashing into a fray. Let's start with those quiet parentheses. You use them to surround something that seems a bit out of place in the

sentence. An aside, a clarification, or a commentary. Sometimes when you go back to

edit your first draft, you'll find that you can rework your sentence to include the parenthetical statement,

or simply delete the part in parentheses,

unless it's something like an irreverent quip you're using to set an intentional tone.

Here's an example of one way to use parentheses to add additional information.

The Loma Priata Earthquake, October 17th, 1989, happened during a national live broadcast of the

World Series, making it an especially memorable event for people who are watching.

The date, October 17th, 1989, is in parentheses in that sentence.

It's something you want to tell the reader, but it isn't a necessary part of the sentence.

...