Whenever I'm out on the waves on my surfboard - that's most weekends - I feel really at peace with the world.
EXPLANATION Sometimes we interrupt the flow of a sentence to insert a thought that, for example, may have just occurred to us. To mark off this parenthetical thought (para- means beside and -thesis means idea), we use commas, brackets or dashes, thereby showing that this thought is not part of our main sentence because the parenthetical asides contain information that could be left out of the sentence - definitions, explanations, comments, etc. Notice how brackets are used in the previous sentence to help explain what parenthetical means. While brackets and dashes are often interchangeable, below are examples of situations where brackets should be used:
- The Duchess of Gloucester (pronounced Glos'ter) was...
- Judith Wright (1915–2000) spent her later years...
- Her next play (The Rover) also used this device.
- Hamlet: (Drawing his sword) How now! A rat?
- As the critic says, 'The world of Hamlet is a world where one has lost one's way' (emphasis is mine).
Dashes are useful for signalling that an abrupt change in the direction of the reader's thoughts is necessary:
Commas are used if the parenthetical phrase only slightly interrupts the flow of the sentence:
They made an attempt, so they said, to break the record.