Book reviews, art, gaming, Objectivism and thoughts on other topics as they occur.

Apr 29, 2009

Queen of Parentheses

I've noticed recently that when I'm making informal comments (such as on a forum or blog), I use WAY too many parenthetical statements. I'm better about this when I'm doing more formal writing, but I wouldn't be surprised if my longer comments are incredibly difficult for some people to understand.

I think I do this because I realize about halfway through a sentence that more background info would be interesting or helpful, but I don't want to go back to restructure my entire comment to include the background in a non-parenthetical way. So my comment may include more asides than comment, and sometimes I make asides inside the asides!

I talk this way, too, which is why I sometimes wind up telling a long rambling story when I just meant to tell a quick funny anecdote. Part of the problem there may also be that most of my funny anecdotes aren't funny unless you know the entire story--I prefer contextual humor to snarky one-liners, so I'll start to tell the story, then backtrack to give the context, then deliver the payload only to get a "hmm" from the person who has long since stopped listening. That in itself is probably pretty amusing, though.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I, too, am far too fond of the parenthetical aside. Also, gerunds.