Parentheses and the punctuation marks that love them …

Kelly reads from your comments …

"… could you write on punctuation and parentheses sometime? I don't think that was ever covered in my various English classes over the years.

- Neil"

First of all, thanks for writing, Neil. You stay classy. (Whee! A request! I'm famous!) … Ahem.

All right. The rules governing punctuation and parentheses are very simple (and, unfortunately, are not related in any way to those governing punctuation and quotation marks – but that's still a topic for another post. Must do that sometime).

Let's say you're ending a sentence with a parenthetical remark (as I'm doing just now). The remark is a dependent clause, so it's still part of the sentence, yet it's separated as something that is not entirely necessary to the sentence (something that could be excised without the sentence losing any of its clarity – although possibly some of its nuance). In this case, the period is outside the parentheses. (This rule also applies to commas and other types of punctuation; if a parenthetical statement is made in the middle of a sentence, all that stuff goes outside.)

Now, notice what I just did. A parenthetical statement which is its own sentence keeps the punctuation inside the parentheses.

And finally, imagine that you've got a statement that's in parentheses, but ends a sentence and begins another (like I'm doing right here. This sentence is my example). So you end the sentence within the parentheses, but then you place the period at the end of the second sentence outside the parentheses.

Here's the rule of thumb ("Ye couldn't hit much of anything wi' that. Perhaps they shoulda had a rule o' wrist"). Imagine that everything within the parentheses suddenly disappeared, because that's what parentheses mean: "The information within my borders is edifying, but unnecessary." Are your sentences still punctuated properly? Are you missing a period at the end of a sentence? Do you have a period out in the middle of nowhere, with no sentence to call home? If so, then revision is in order.

And if you can guess the movie from which the above parenthetical quote came, then you get a prize! (The prize of my undying appreciation for your knowledge of cult films. And that, my friend, is a gift you can take to the bank – where the tellers will probably look at you funny for trying to translate something like "appreciation" into something like "money.")