On 7/22/22, G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > I disagree with this, because I find it awkward to put one complete > sentence as a parenthetical inside another. I believe a sentence should > remain grammatical even if the parentheses are removed.
As a middle-ground opinion from another punctuation tyrant, I'm generally OK with a parenthetical full sentence in the MIDDLE of a sentence (provided it scans smoothly, but that's a basic requirement of all writing). But when a parenthetical sentence occurs right before a sentence's terminal period, as what Alex is proposing in this case, I invariably find this a little awkward, and want the parenthetical moved outside the sentence. A period followed by an open parenthesis is a very strong signal to the reader that whatever is in the coming parentheses relates to the previous sentence; there is no need to defer the period to indicate this. But I would propose a different solution to this case, because here the parenthetical doesn't even apply to the whole sentence, but only to the first half of it. Thus I would change this: They can be specified in any lettercase and must be separated by commas, spaces, or tabs. (AT&T tbl accepted only options with all characters in the same lettercase.) to: They can be specified in any lettercase (AT&T tbl accepted only options with all characters in the same lettercase) and must be separated by commas, spaces, or tabs. Branden has already objected to such a construction on the grounds that it fails to parse when the parentheses are removed. But saying a sentence still needs to parse with arbitrary punctuation removed strikes me as an absurdly high bar to clear: punctuation exists precisely to affect the parsing of words. And I can't see any reader getting tripped up by the construction above. However, even Branden's more stringent requirement can be met by turning the parenthetical sentence into a subordinate clause: They can be specified in any lettercase (unlike in AT&T tbl, which accepted only options with all characters in the same lettercase) and must be separated by commas, spaces, or tabs. It's a couple words longer, but in my opinion more clearly structured, because the parenthetical appears immediately after the phrase it's modifying.
