Parentheses | Punctuation | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

hey grammarians hey Paige hi David so
today we're going to talk about
parentheses so before we get into what
parentheses do I would like to talk very
briefly about the word origin of
parentheses or parentheses because it
comes from Greek so para means besides
and in thisis means in placing right so
it's it's it's placed beside
approximately and how we use parentheses
as we kind of put them to the side for a
little what would are called the sides
in writing little interruptions so let's
let's lay out the functions of
parentheses and I should say the
singular form of parentheses is
parentheses that's just one of these two
of them is parentheses like so so page
what is it parentheses and what does it
do so a parenthesis is a piece of
punctuation that has kind of a lot of
different functions it can indicate
remarks by the writer of a text okay or
specify a definition or a reference it
can also show interruptions by an
audience but sort of overall the the
parentheses separates a piece of
technically unnecessary information or
what we called an aside from the rest of
a sentence so it separates in essential
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 a time
alright 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 a writer you
know which is whoever ate the cookie
mm-hmm namely me we would put in this
parenthetical remark right it's some
extra information so and when I say para
ethical I'm talking about this this
little aside here that's what I mean by
a parenthetical so this is what's called
a parenthetical aside so the second way
in which you use parenthesis is to
specify a definition or reference so
let's say I wanted to quote pages as yet
unwritten autobiography okay um so it so
what i'm doing here is i'm using this
parenthetical aside to cite where in her
book she said oh no a tiger so let's say
this is a what i'm doing here this
sentence is like an excerpt from some
essay that I'm writing about pages life
and times which i've italicized here
because it is a book right so what i'm
doing here is i have the quote and then
in order to say where that reference
comes from i 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
parentheses so let's say you're taking
down a transcript of a speech you're
typing up someone's speech and they
start coughing and it interrupts the way
they're giving a speech let's say i was
trying to render the sentence
furthermore i must firmly state that
right so you can you can include the
coughing right 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 save loop OOP yep coughing
happened here I see so those are the
uses of the parentheses you can indicate
remarks by the writer as in our first
example or specify a definition or
reference which we did here with a
reference to my book or you can show an
interruption in speech that's it sweet
so what happened with the tiger that's a
long story
alright we'll talk about that later you
can learn anything David out page out