Free, easy to understand English
grammar and writing tutorial lessons

Click for Main Topic List

Punctuation

The period or full stop

The comma

Connecting clauses

Lists in a sentence

Separating lists of adjectives

Parenthetical phrases

Introductory phrases

Quotation marks

Using single quotation marks

The exclamation mark or exclamation point

The question mark

The colon

When to capitalise after a colon

The semicolon

The apostrophe

Making words plural using apostrophes

The hyphen

Dividing words at the end of a line

Using hyphens to create compound numbers

Using hyphens to avoid confusion

Using hyphens to join words together to form adjectival phrases

Using hyphens with prefixes

Using hyphens for position descriptions

The em and en dash

Parentheses

Brackets

The forward slash

To indicate choice between multiple options

For dates

Fractions

The ellipsis or dot dot dot

Parentheses

These punctuation symbols are known as parentheses, not as brackets.

When you want to include some extra information in a sentence but not draw too much attention to it, use parentheses:

David (the guy we met yesterday) will be coming to dinner tonight.

Like any other punctuation mark, there are rules for how to use parentheses. If the parentheses are in the middle of a sentence, don’t use a period at the end of the material inside them, and don’t capitalise the first letter. You can, however, put other punctuation marks like question marks or exclamation points, at the end of the phrase inside the parentheses:

David (he was the guy who yelled at us!) will be coming to dinner tonight.

If there is a complete sentence inside the parentheses, it can be made into its own sentence. If this happens, we need to capitalise the first letter of the first word, and end the sentence with a period or any other appropriate punctuation (you could also use a question mark or an exclamation point). The punctuation at the end of the sentence goes inside the closing parenthesis.

David will be coming to dinner tonight. (He’s the guy who we met yesterday.)

Click here to move on to the next topic: Brackets