When Reading a Sentence Out Loud, Do You Read What Is in Parentheses?

March 01, 2022 Post a Comment

Parentheses can be used almost anywhere, but they are rarely seen in fictional dialogue or in quoted speech of whatever kind. The problem with parentheses in dialogue is that readers may non know exactly how to translate them.

What are parentheses?

A parenthesis (singular) is a word or group of words that has been set off from its surroundings. Whether in speech or in writing, a parenthesis acts as a commentary or as an aside or other digression. In writing, the punctuation marks known as parentheses (plural; they e'er come in pairs) signal this departure from the surrounding text.

A parenthesis can also exist signaled past commas or dashes—or, at the end of a sentence, by a single comma or dash.

But parentheses practice something commas and dashes can't: they create an interior space that resides just below the surface and that acts sort of like an inline footnote. In other words, unlike commas or dashes, parentheses signal that the words enclosed do non fully belong to the text that surrounds them.

To exist parenthetical is to be outside the text (or, literally, within the text but not of it).

In narrative text (like most of the words in this post), there'southward no problem: y'all know that the words in parentheses are from the narrator and that they are directed to the reader.

But quoted speech is more complicated than that. In existent life, speakers make asides and digressions all the fourth dimension—to themselves or to their interlocutors or to an audience (or to the sky, a deity, etc.). But in real life, gestures and tone of vocalism can do a lot. When speech is translated to the page, parentheses by themselves may not tell us what we need to know.

Jane Austen's parentheses

Sense and Sensibility, snippet from pages 87 and 88 in the first edition

Sense and Sensibility, vol. i (1811), pp. 87–88

The trouble with parentheses in dialogue dates dorsum at least two hundred years.

The half dozen or so novels past Jane Austen that were published between 1811 and 1818 keep to stand up as models for how to present—and punctuate—dialogue and narrative. Only a few of those older usages no longer apply. Parentheses in dialogue are a instance in point.

Consider this passage from Sense and Sensibility (1811):

"It would be impossible, I know," replied Elinor, "to convince y'all that a woman of vii and twenty could feel for a man of xxx-five whatever thing most enough to love, to brand him a desirable companion to her. But I must object to your dooming Colonel Brandon and his married woman to the abiding solitude of a ill sleeping accommodation, merely considering he chanced to mutter yesterday (a very cold damp day) of a slight rheumatic feel in 1 of his shoulders." (vol 1., pp. 87–88)

The words in parentheses would seem to represent Elinor making a sort of aside to her sister Marianne to remind her, in back up of her (Elinor's) argument, that it had been very cold and damp the day earlier. That works well enough—except that information technology could be misconstrued as the narrator reminding u.s.a. of this.

Readers of Jane Austen would be justified in such a misreading. Hither'due south a passage from later in the book:

Sense and Sensibility, snippet from page 238 in the first edition

Sense and Sensibility, vol. 1 (1811), p. 238

"I think Edward," said Mrs. Dashwood, every bit they were at breakfast the terminal morning, "you would be a happier human if you had any profession to engage your time and give an interest to your plans and actions. Some inconvenience to your friends, indeed, might consequence from it—you would not be able to requite them so much of your time. Simply (with a smile) you would exist materially benefited in 1 particular at least. You would know where to go when you left them." (vol. 1, p. 238)

This time the text in parentheses—"(with a smile)"—belongs to the narrator and not to the speaker (Mrs. Dashwood). This parenthetical aside, then, functions like a stage direction. In plays and other dramatic works stage directions are typically placed in parentheses (see CMOS 13.46), but that makes the utilize of parentheses for the speaker'due south own words an unworkable option in drama.

In a novel or a story yous don't have the trouble of competing with parenthetical stage directions, but as Jane Austen shows, just the fact that they might exist used in this way makes parentheses potentially ambiguous in quoted dialogue.

Editing Jane Austen

Fortunately, parentheses are never your only choice.

Yous may have noticed in that concluding passage from Sense and Sensibility that it included a dash used in the modernistic style—exactly equally we might utilise ane today.*

So a copyeditor would accept had no problem editing that beginning passage even in 1811:

". . . merely because he chanced to complain yesterday—a very cold clammy day—of a slight rheumatic experience . . ."

In the second passage, commas could be used to create a narrative interruption:

". . . and then much of your time. Simply," she added with a grin, "you would be materially benefited . . ."

And that's exactly how both scenarios might exist handled today.

Square brackets might besides have been an option for that grin; subsequently all, brackets signal editorial or narrative interpolation (come across CMOS xiii.threescore). But they aren't commonly used this style in fiction.†

What about today?

Parentheses in dialogue were mutual in Jane Austen'southward time. You'll find them fifty years earlier (east.thousand., in Fielding's Tom Jones) and 50 years later (in Dickens'south Great Expectations).

But they're rare in gimmicky works—or at to the lowest degree they seem to be. Zeroing in on punctuation marks in context isn't easy to exercise for works that are still in copyright. (For Jane Austen and other such works in the public domain, the availability of full-text HTML, including punctuation, makes investigations of this kind a relatively unproblematic matter.)

If you're tempted to use parentheses in dialogue in your ain creative piece of work (or to allow them every bit a copyeditor), proceed in mind that there is no settled convention for what they mean. So unless yous're willing to tell your readers that, for example, such-and-such a grapheme has a addiction of muttering parenthetical asides, you'll take to trust your readers to effigy it out.

PS: Accept you seen parentheses in recently published dialogue? If so, permit us know in the comments.

Title page of the first edition of the Manual of Style, 1906

Transmission of Style, 1st ed. (1906), title page

* Dashes in older works (including those of Jane Austen) also tended to announced together with other marks of punctuation, such as semicolons or commas,—like this. This exercise, which was mutual in the nineteenth century, was already being discouraged equally of the get-go edition of what was and then known simply as the Transmission of Style (1906); see ¶ 159 (p. 56).

† You might utilize square brackets to create a sort of scholarly, metanarrative issue. In creative writing, annihilation that supports the narrative vocalisation has a gamble of being successful.

Fiction+ posts at Shop Talk reverberate the opinions of its authors and not necessarily those of The Chicago Manual of Way or the University of Chicago Press.

~ ~ ~

Russell Harper is editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A and was the principal reviser of the concluding two editions of The Chicago Transmission of Style. He also contributed to the revisions of the last ii editions of Kate L. Turabian'due south A Manual for Writers of Enquiry Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.