ShmoopTube

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it's the most wonderful time of the year.

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what no it's not Christmas it's time to talk about parentheses , duh. Christmas [man shoveling snow]

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come on you guys be serious. alright so we use parentheses to enclose

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non-restrictive or parenthetical elements. what? yeah sounds complicated

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but those are just phrases or sentences that can be removed from the main

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sentence without changing its meaning. that means that if we see a

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parenthetical in a sentence we can grab it by its parentheses and just toss it [pig in the mud]

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away and the sentence will still work just fine. that said not all

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parentheticals are the same, so we have to be careful about how we punctuate

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them. when just because you can throw them away doesn't make them garbage and

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if you ever find yourself writing sentences that contain little bits of [man in front of garbage dump]

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garbage, well there might be something wrong with your pen. sometimes our

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parenthetical is just a word or phrase rather than a complete sentence like in

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this example .in this case it gets enclosed in parentheses but we don't add [dog chasing ball]

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any other punctuation. so for a sentence like after swimming lessons ( every

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Tuesday at 4:30) I get a soda. that parenthetical can go punctuation

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free. on the other hand a parenthetical might contain an entire sentence. if a

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parenthetical, like this guy, is in the middle of a sentence well it doesn't get

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any punctuation. but if it's after a sentence it gets treated just like a

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normal sentence with a capital letter at the start and a punctuation mark at the

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end. so in a sentence like he quacked and bit ( ducks aren't always great [ducks swimming on a pond]

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company) until we ran away, that parenthetical stays nice and

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unpunctuated. didn't Shakespeare write that? however if we tacked that parenthetical right after

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the original sentence like so . well we'd need to capitalize the first letter and

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throw a period at the end to get it into tip-top shape there. but regardless of

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where you put the parenthetical, we definitely don't recommend hanging out [woman feeds ducks]

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with ducks. they might not have any sharp teeth in those beaks but they can be vicious.

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so so vicious, right. [duck chases screaming woman]

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