Useful Pairs

Parentheses and brackets (specifically, square brackets) normally come in pairs, as do other types of brackets and braces. Their main job is to set things off from their surroundings.

To find out more—and to test your knowledge of these pairs of related marks—take the quiz.

Subscribers to The Chicago Manual of Style Online may click through to the linked sections of the Manual (cited in most of the answers). (We also offer a 30-day free trial of CMOS Online.)

Note: Style guides sometimes disagree. Except for a few details that can be verified in standard dictionaries and encyclopedias and other readily available sources, the answers in this quiz rely on the information in The Chicago Manual of Style.

[Editor’s note: This quiz relies on and links to the 17th edition of CMOS.]

Chicago Style Workout 66: Parentheses (and Brackets)

1. The word parentheses can apply to both the marks and the words they enclose.

True

False

2. Another name for parentheses is round brackets.

True

False

3. As sentence punctuation, parentheses most closely resemble which of the following marks?

commas

dashes

4. Within a sentence, parentheses should never be used to enclose another complete sentence.

True

False

5. In Chicago style, parentheses within parentheses

are set as square brackets

are not permitted

6. In Chicago style, back-to-back parentheses should always be combined into one set of parentheses.

True

False

7. In Chicago style, a comma never immediately precedes an opening parenthesis.

True

False

8. In fictional dialogue, parentheses

enclose unspoken discourse

are not normally used

9. In quoted text, square brackets usually enclose

text that isn’t part of the original quotation

a source citation

10. Parentheses and brackets are always used in pairs.

True

False

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Parenthetical clouds by Sergey Novikov / Adobe Stock.

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