Parentheses Punctuation Khan Academy

hey garans hey Paige hi David So today we're going to talk about parentheses so before we get into what parentheses do would like to talk very briefly about the word origin of parenthesis or parenthesis because it comes from Greek so par means besides and in thesis means placing right so it's it's it's placed beside approximately and how we use parentheses is we kind of put them to the side for little what what are called the sides in writing little interruptions so let's let's lay out the functions of parentheses and should say the singular form of parentheses is parenthesis that's just one of these two of them is parentheses like so so page what what is parenthesis and what does it do so parenthesis is piece of punctuation that has kind of lot of different functions it can indicate remarks by the writer of text okay or specify definition or reference it can also show interruptions by an audience but sort of overall the the parenthesis separates piece of technically unnecessary information or what we called an aside from the rest of sentence so it separates inessential information right you you can take out what's in the parentheses and the sentence will still make sense all right so let's let's take these one at time all right so here we've got something like the cookie which was still warm was delicious now we could conceivably take that out of the sentence right because the sentence is basically the cookie was delicious but if we wanted to add an additional remark by writer you know which is whoever ate that cookie namely me we would put in this parenthetical remark right it's some extra information so and and when say parenthetical I'm I'm talking about this this little aside here that's what mean by parenthetical so this is what's called parenthetical aside so the second way in which you use parentheses is to specify definition or reference so let's say wanted to quote Pages as yet Unwritten autobiography okay so so what I'm doing here is I'm using this parenthetical aside to site where in her book she said no tiger so let's say this is what I'm doing here this sentence is like an excerpt from some essay that I'm writing about Pages Life and Times which vitalized here because it is book right so what I'm doing here is have the quote and then in order to say where that ref reference comes from give the the author's last name the name of the book and then page 38 and all of that is inside parentheses like so that's the second use of the parenthesis so let's say you're taking down transcript of speech you're typing up someone's speech and they start coughing and it interrupts the way they're giving speech mhm let's say was trying to render the sentence furthermore must firmly state that right so you can you can include the cing in the sentence when you're when you're writing it down or transcribing it like if we think this is important enough to note we can just sort of say voop voop yep coughing happened here see so those are the uses of the parenthesis you can indicate remarks by the writer as in our first example or specify definition or reference which we did here with reference to my book or you can show an interruption in speech that's it sweet so what happened with that tiger that's long story all right we'll talk about that later you can learn anything David out paig out