Parentheticals: Should I or Shouldn’t I?
Posted: March 22nd, 2011 | Author: mariebuckley | Filed under: Talking About the Cases | Tags: legal writing, parentheticals | 1 Comment »It’s always better to discusses cases in prose, rather than in parentheticals. Prose is cleaner and more readable. Also, the decision to discuss a case in prose or parentheticals signals that you have assigned a certain value to a case. Your reader will assume that you discuss the most important cases in prose and that cases discussed in parentheticals are less important. Read the rest of this entry »
[…] Your most important cases should always be discussed in prose, rather than in a parenthetical. The decision to discuss a case in prose shows that you assign a higher value to that case than to the cases that you discuss in parentheticals. But even if you discuss a case in prose, you might still need to write parentheticals to flesh out minor facts or the procedural history of the case. (And, yes, you should use parentheticals to share the facts of minor cases.) […]