A Word, Please: Parentheses can drive a sentence off a cliff

Parenthesis addiction is a rare but serious disease affecting approximately one out of every 20 writers I edit. Its painful side effects include lost readers and seething rage at the unseen editor who rewrote your work. Its symptoms are illustrated in the following sentence.

“With its impressive acceleration (our test drive rocketed us from zero to 60 in less than six seconds), a sporty new look (the two-door coupe boasts curved fenders and performance tires) and excellent fuel economy (the 38 mpg highway rating is a 10% improvement over the prior model year), the new X420 is a great new entry into the market (assuming you can handle the price tag, which starts at just under $50,000 for the base model and approaches $65,000 with all the bells and whistles, including Bluetooth connectivity).”

Clearly, anyone who expects a reader to remain seated for that ride is living in a fantasy world, right? The human brain can only hang on for so many side trips, and that’s if the human is really making an effort to stay with you.

In this case, expecting the reader to maintain focus on the main point despite all those diversions is just nuts.

There’s a lesson here not just for the parentheses-addicted but for everyone: Parenthetical insertions are distractions from your main point. Sometimes the information you insert in them is worth the price your reader pays. Sometimes it isn’t. And the more of those distractions you insert, the more your main point suffers.

The cure is better organization of your information and better priorities. Looking at the example sentence again, we see that there are about nine statements — nine main bits of information — the writer is trying to convey.

They are: impressive acceleration, a 10-second zero-to-60 rating, a sporty look, curved fenders and performance tires, excellent fuel economy, a 10% mpg increase, the fact that the car is a great new entry, the price, and a bit about some bells and whistles.

Besides the excessive amount of information crammed into this sentence, two things are most striking. For starters, three of the first six pieces of information are redundant. The car has impressive acceleration. The car accelerated from zero to 60 in 10 seconds. The car has good fuel economy. It gets 38 mpg highway. It has a sporty new look. It has curved fenders and performance tires.

In the age-old battle between “show” and “tell,” this writer refused to take sides. She insisted on doing both.

The second thing that strikes me about this sentence is that its main clause — the central idea — is the lamest, most self-evident, least necessary piece of information in the whole sentence. It is this: The new X420 is a great new entry. Was that even worth saying? I think not. But even if the writer believes it was, it should not have gotten top billing in the sentence, leaving all the substantive stuff crammed into parentheses and modifying phrases.

Fixing a sentence like this is all about priorities. You have to decide which of these pieces of information you want to convey and which you can dispense with. If you’re short on space and sure the reader doesn’t care much about the details, then perhaps keep the super-simplistic main clause about the car being a great new entry.

If you have the space, then that main clause can probably be dispensed with altogether. Try turning some of the parenthetical information into complete, free-standing sentences. The information they contain would surely get across the point that the car is a great new entry.

Either way, you have to choose. You can convey a sentence worth of ideas in the space of about one sentence, or you can convey five sentences worth of information in about five sentences worth of space. It’s when you try to have it both ways that you clearly have a problem.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].