Grammar Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

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

we're going to talk about three punctuation marks, one you undoubtedly know how to use,

another you possibly misuse, and then another you've likely never used. And then we investigate

what actually makes a square meal square and not round or trapezoid. You're probably

well versed in the basics of how to use those sideways eyebrow thingies better known as

parentheses, but the details can get tricky. First, remember that a pair of them is called

parentheses, but a single one is a parenthesis. For now, let's just say that parentheses

mainly enclose information that isn't vital to a sentence. But no matter what you put inside

parentheses, one important thing to remember is that your sentence still has to make sense

if you delete them and everything inside. And although you're allowed to put both partial

sentences and complete sentences inside parentheses, you shouldn't put more than a whole paragraph

inside, according to Granger's Modern English usage. One thing people often wonder is how

to use terminal punctuation marks with parentheses. Well, if your sentence starts with an opening

parenthesis and what's inside your parentheses is a complete sentence, then the terminal

punctuation mark, such as a period question marker exclamation point, goes inside the closing

parenthesis. For example, if you wrote, I knew he wouldn't want to do that inside parentheses,

the period goes at the end of the sentence after the word that and inside the closing

parenthesis. On the other hand, if what's inside the parentheses is only a partial sentence,

then you put the terminal punctuation outside instead. For example, if you wrote, I moved

to America when I was 10 and then put 1980 in parentheses, you put the period after that

closing parenthesis because in 1980 isn't a complete sentence. For the most part, these

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