Use Parentheses for Explanatory and Other Minor Asides

Parentheses are always used in pairs. They tend to deemphasize the material within them and suggest that this material is not necessary for understanding your overall point.

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Avoid putting essential information or ideas in parentheses:

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You can enclose whole sentences in parentheses, and when you do, in order to get the rest of the punctuation and the capitalization correct, you’ll need to decide whether the contents are parenthetical to the sentence or to the larger idea you’re exploring in the paragraph.

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Use parentheses around acronyms that you are introducing:

Information technology (IT) can be used to record and analyze language exactly.

Also use parentheses around the numbers in enumerations:

The handbook is divided into three sections: (1) style, (2) grammar, and (3) punctuation and mechanics.