40b Use brackets.

40b
Use brackets.

Use brackets to enclose any parenthetical elements in material that is itself within parentheses. Also use brackets to enclose explanatory words or comments that you are inserting into a quotation.

Eventually, the investigation had to examine the major agencies (including the National Security Agency [NSA]) that were conducting covert operations.

Massing notes that “on average, it [ Fox News] attracts more than eight million people daily—more than double the number who watch CNN.”

The bracketed words clarify it in the original quotation.

In the quotation in the following sentence, the artist Gauguin’s name is misspelled. The bracketed word sic, which means “so,” tells readers that the person being quoted—not the writer who has picked up the quotation—made the mistake, in this case misspelling Gauguin’s name.

One admirer wrote, “She was the most striking woman I’d ever seen—a sort of wonderful combination of Mia Farrow and one of Gaugin’s [sic] Polynesian nymphs.”