Brackets are extremely useful tools to set apart essential information from “nice to have” details that add colour but could (if you had to be ruthless) be dropped without losing the meaning of the sentence. Taking my last sentence as an example, if you pruned the bracketed words, the sentence would still express the same thought but by keeping the words in brackets, the reader benefits from additional information without interrupting the sentence flow.
Explaining why brackets are so popular, here are just some of their many uses:
– Add information or explanation
– Denote an afterthought, confidential remark or aside
– Clarify or comment on an assertion
– Illustrate a point
– Express doubt (?)
– Indicate an option(s)
So brackets are a highly useful punctuation mark. But beware of committing the most common form of bracket abuse – cramming in too much information so that by the time the reader has come to the end of a mini essay they have clean forgotten the beginning of the sentence!
