Butchering Brackets

It's pathetic the way people butcher the English language, but it is more appalling to find some of the worst examples in the writings of people who claim to be poets. Chat lingo, not captializing the word "I". But the latest craze seems to be to use brackets improperly and sometimes not even in the stead of parentheses but for no real reason at all. It's even made its way into the media, in advertising and design.

Now a Webster's Dictionary being sold at the dollar store defines "bracket" as "a mark [] used to enclose words" but any intelligent person would already know that that is not an elaborate definition. That's not all the bracket is.

So what are brackets for if not to make your free verse look cool and modern (if you can call THAT cool)?

Well first off, a bracket is not just a cool looking alternative to the parentheses (which some people have even stated that they thought after being corrected). Brackets are used to explain things - things that have been omitted - within quoted material.

For example, if you were quoting a famous celebrity and they were talking about the garbage dump and said, "It's beautiful" you might want to add brackets like, "It's [the garbage dump] beautiful" to make it more clear in your gossip magazine.

Brackets can also be used to include parenthetical material INSIDE of other parenthetical material.*

So stop being "cool" by acting like an ignorant (or artsy [not really]) dummy and use brackets and the English language correctly!




*Read more?
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/bracket.htm