Parenthetical material is sectioned off from the body of the sentence or quotation by the parentheses, or curved brackets, for example: My eldest son (well, stepson, to be exact) will be joining the firm next year. The words in parenthesis can be deleted without affecting the sense of the statement.
In formal or legal documents, dates or amounts of money may be given in both words and numerals, for example: … this fourteenth (14th) day of April in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and One (1901) etc …
The room cost me £2 (two pounds) per day.
The magazine cost $4.00 (four dollars).
Round brackets ( ) should be used sparingly, i.e. as a last resort if you need to include an aside comment in another sentence. They often appear when further explanation or qualification is required for a particular word or phrase, and it would be overkill to construct a new sentence to explain this.
Square brackets [ ] are used
- to enclose editorial comments that are not part of an author’s original wording. Round brackets are used in all other cases
- when the author is making a comment inside a quotation
Brackets inside brackets, unless editorial comments, will be normal brackets, e.g. ( ( ) ).
SQUARE BRACKETS ( [ ] )
Square brackets are used to enclose other parenthetical matter within a parenthesis, for example: We were ready to board the train when the staff (Mr Thomas, Giles Penn [the accountant], Mrs Travers and the two canteen ladies) came running along the platform.
The square brackets show that Giles Penn and the accountant are one and the same.
Other types of brackets — angle brackets < > and brace brackets { } — are used in programming, mathematics and tabulations
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