How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem by Ben Yagoda

curve facing right. (Don’t laugh—I have encountered such orphan parentheses on lots of occasions.)
You can’t follow a set of parentheses immediately with another set of parentheses, unless you’re being cute. Being cute is a risky game.
If by any chance you feel you need to use a pair of parentheses within a pair of parentheses, first of all, see if there is a way to avoid this. If there isn’t, use brackets ([]) instead of parentheses for the interior pair. That reminds me that the only other common use for brackets is to briefly clarify something ambiguous or deleted within a quotation.
    When Haldeman said that John Dean was about to testify, Nixon replied, “That’s a load of [expletive deleted].”
    The content
inside
parentheses (TCIP) has to conform to a lot of rules, many of them relating to the relationship between the TCIP and the material that comes before it. If both are complete sentences (and remember that TCIP can be more than one sentence), follow this pattern.
    I loved the play last night. (The rest of the audience seemed to feel otherwise. Or so it seemed.)
    If TCIP is not a complete sentence, then:
    Do not put any punctuation immediately before or after the open parenthesis.
Make the first word of TCIP lowercase, unless a proper noun.
No punctuation right before the close parenthesis, with the occasional exception, in informal writing, of an exclamation point or question mark.
Choose whether or not to use any punctuation after the close parenthesis based on the particular needs of the sentence.
    Here are some examples, all of them in the form of song titles (parenthetical song titles being a splendid and underappreciated genre). The titles are given in lowercase so as to show proper capitalization, and closing punctuation is included.
    (You gotta) fight for your right (to party).
    There’s a kind of hush (all over the world).
    You can look (but you better not touch).
    I (who have nothing).
    Don’t come home a drinkin’ (with lovin’ on your mind).
    Alone again (naturally).
    If I said you had a beautiful body (would you hold it against me)?
    What about punctuation when the parentheses come in the middle of sentence? Simply act as though the parens were not there, and put the appropriate punctuation at the end of the close parenthesis. (This is the opposite of what you do with em-dashes. Go figure.)
    Weighing in on the question were Bernstein (against it), Gallo (for it), and Allenson (undecided).
    C. Words
    1. THE SINGLE MOST COMMON MISTAKE IS THE MOST EASILY FIXABLE MISTAKE
    Simply put, this is to clean up after yourself. Writing on computers leads to a category of sloppy error that was rare in typewriter days and probably nonexistent when people used pen on paper: forgetting to delete a word.
    [
The president announced an initiative that
would
will create a new academic department.
]
    “Policing the area,” as it were, is an aspect of attentiveness or mindfulness, and it’s not hard to do. So do it.
    2. SPELLING
    a. Homophone-phobia
    Spell-check programs are great. Spell-check programs are a disaster.
    Let me explain.
    Back in the old days, students would frequently make spelling mistakes like
embarass
(instead of
embarrass
) or
influencial
(instead of
influential
). No more. Modern word processing programs put squiggly red lines under misspelled words or, better yet, silently correct them (as mine just tried to do with
embarass
).
    The programs are not perfect, even on their own terms. My version of Microsoft Word accepts
miniscule
unsquiggled, eventhough the correct spelling is
minuscule
, and
alright
even though
all right
is preferred by every authority I’m aware of. And although Word does in fact indicate that
momento
(as opposed to
memento
) is an error, many of my students apparently don’t believe it, because they go ahead and write
momento
anyway. I wonder about that, and sentences I get along the lines of:
    “The
[
pengellem
]
is swinging fully against finance reform,” Vogel