by Chelsea Lee
Punctuation Junction:
A series about what happens when punctuation marks collide.
Parentheses
and brackets
are used to enclose and set off material from the main text.
Although writers usually
need only one set of parentheses or brackets at a time, for more complex
material they may need an enclosure within an enclosure (referred to as a double enclosure in this post).
Four guidelines govern how to use these punctuation marks
together (or not) to handle double enclosures in an APA Style paper.
1. Use brackets
inside parentheses to create a double enclosure in the text. Avoid parentheses
within parentheses, or nested parentheses.
- Correct: (We also administered the Beck
Depression Inventory [BDI; Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988], but those results
are not reported here.)
- Incorrect: (We also administered the Beck
Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988), but those results
are not reported here.)
2. Separate citations
from parenthetical text with either semicolons (for parenthetical-style
citations) or commas around the year (for narrative citations). Do not use a
double enclosure or back-to-back parentheses.
- Correct: Gender differences may reflect
underlying continuous attributes, such as personality (e.g., communion and agency;
Spence & Helmreich, 1978). These distinctions are reflected in sexually
dimorphic brain structures (see Ellis et al., 2008, for recent meta-analyses).
- Incorrect: Gender differences may reflect
underlying continuous attributes, such as personality (e.g., communion and
agency) (Spence & Helmreich, 1978). These distinctions are reflected in
sexually dimorphic brain structures (see Ellis et al. [2008] for recent
meta-analyses).
3. When a mathematical
equation contains one level of enclosure, use parentheses, ( ); for two levels,
add brackets outside, [( )]; for three levels, add curly brackets outside, {[(
)]}.
- Correct: Participants were asked to solve the
following math problem for x after
completing the priming measures: 8[x
+ 4(2x + 1)] = 248
- Incorrect: Participants were asked to solve the
following math problem for x after
completing the priming measures: 8(x
+ 4[2x + 1]) = 248
4. Avoid adding a
level of enclosure to statistics that already contain parentheses. Instead, use
commas to set off the statistics from the text.
- Correct: The results were statistically
significant, F(1, 32) = 4.37, p = .045.
- Incorrect: The results were statistically
significant (F[1, 32] = 4.37, p = .045).
- Incorrect: The results were statistically
significant [F(1, 32) = 4.37, p = .045].
For more on how these
punctuation marks are used, see Publication Manual §4.09, §4.10, and
§4.47. Keep an eye out for more Punctuation Junction posts coming soon!
***
Example text in Guideline 2 adapted from “Men and Women Are From Earth:
Examining the Latent Structure of Gender,” by B. J. Carothers and H. T.
Reis, 2013, Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 104, p. 386. Copyright 2013 by the American Psychological
Association.
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