An article in the recent New Yorker shows that even well edited writing continues the abuse of parentheses. Here’s the full paragraph, taken from The Financial Page, written by James Surowiecki, titled The Cult of Overwork:
If the benefits of working fewer hours are this clear, why has it been so hard for businesses to embrace the idea? Simple economics certainly plays a role: in some cases, such as law firms that bill by the hour, the system can reward you for working longer, not smarter. And even if a person pulling all-nighters is less productive than a well-rested substitute would be, it’s still cheaper to pay one person to work a hundred hours a week than two people to work fifty hours apiece. (In the case of medicine, residents work long hours not just because it’s good training but also because they’re a cheap source of labor.) On top of this, the productivity of most knowledge workers is much harder to quantify than that of, say, an assembly-line worker. So, as Bob Pozen, a former president of Fidelity Management and the author of “Extreme Productivity,” a book on slashing work hours, told me, “Time becomes an easy metric to measure how productive someone is, even though it doesn’t have any necessary connection to what they achieve.”
Every sentence in the paragraph above, except for the one within the parentheses, is justified—if only by common sense. But then there’s that one-off claim about medical residents being a cheap source of labor. No reason, no evidence. Are we to suppose the sentence gets a free dodge by way of its parentheses? After all, it’s just an aside and not even part of the article’s main text.
No, parentheses, like all punctuation, exist for clarity, not for shielding writers from the responsibility of defending their ideas. Shoving words between a pair of parentheses doesn’t make those words any less important or plain to see. Dear reader, please, please don’t use parentheses for passive aggression. Either leave those claims naked in your prose without special punctuation, or defend them, or don’t commit them to words at all.
By the way, I’ve got nothing against James Surowiecki or The New Yorker. Rather, this post is part of my ongoing crusade against the overuse and misuse of parentheses.
