If I’d let my brain do its thing we’d be 3 levels of nesting deep on the regular.
Fuck me running (because I do that all the damn time)
If you use too many parentheses you might have a lisp.
we should normalise nested parentheses
I use them a lot
It’s more common than you might think
You can use em dashes instead, but then you risk being accused being an LLM.
I—like many people—also enjoy a good em dash.
Why em dash when en dash is so accessible?
Em dash is — I believe — the correct one for interjections / parentheses replacement. On mobile it’s easily accessible, on my desktop I get it with Alt + - but I had to set it up myself.
I can only find - on my phone keyboard
I get it when I long press -
- –—
Ah yes. Thanks.
No, that is morse code, try again.
Adding and removing parenthetical clauses from my email until they all suddenly resolve, collapsing to nothing and I am left with an empty email. “Brilliant!” I think, and close Outlook, having solved my own problem.
ADHD person here. Been making an effort lately to use less parenthesis. A thing I quickly found is that many of them can be replaced with a comma just fine. Or, just like, taking the extra two seconds to turn one run-on sentence into two. (But then again turning my comments into puzzles is fun).
Half the time I realize the parenthesis works better as a separate sentence, preceding the original sentence, because I’d gone “Thought (context).” instead of “Context; thought.”
But then I start writing “thought (context1; small tangent; context2 (sub-context)). Follow-up thought (…” and it’s a damn Chinese puzzle trying to put back flat and in the right-order.
That’s when someone just quotes one sentence out of context and I am heartbroken.
“I am heartbroken.”
Omg what happened, why are you heartbroken?
are you heartbroken?
Yeah, they just said they were!
Scientist: Scientific findings are meaningless when taken out of context.
Journalist: Scientist says scientific findings are meaningless!
I am always getting to the end of comments or really anything I write to someone (especially if more than a few sentences). Then get frustrated to see that I just ended up inserting basically a paragraph’s worth of shit inside one sentence. I have like a really hard time making simple and condensed information (or other times the complete opposite and say waaaay too little).
It is like a really strong need to try an provide all the information that could lead to being taken the wrong way. Or to convey that I considered obvious arguments to save people from bringing them up needlessly. And I think that using parenthesis looks less “bad” than the super long run-on sentences. I am the worst person in my friend-groups if someone wants a TL;DR of things fast.
Texts can still be long-winded without parentheses. The trick is to consider which information the other person needs in this moment. It’s definitely a skill worth developing.
That said, sometimes I still info dump just because I love it. And there are people who appreciate me for it, too.
Discovered the same thing about a year ago, it works amazingly well !
Of course, it often then becomes a comma splice; in that case, a period or semicolon works (but I use comma splices constantly anyway).
Puffed while reading your comment 😆
Jokes on you I nest those things too (sometimes sentances need some extra extra (like this one))
My issue is that I really dislike nested brackets in text. They are fine in math but only with appropriate
\left,\right,\bigl,\bigr, …
Primary thought (secondary supporting thought [tertiary supporting thought {fucking quaternary supporting thought, we have long since forgotten the primary thought}])
DAE start their parenthetical thought and end up writing full and multiple sentences inside it before returning to the original point?
I try to catch myself and just make a new paragraph when that happens but I’m not always successful.
Guilty, but now I’m considering switching to footnotes¹. They let you express a related thought without disrupting the flow².
¹I blame House of Leaves. Lotta footnotes in there, and they can go a long way before they really get out of hand.
² Sure there are cons, like the fact that the reader has to go to the bottom for context, but there’s also no real length limit.
I love the way house of leaves does footnotes, it’s basically an entire other book crammed into the same space. I still haven’t finished it because I keep getting lost…
I’m stuck at chapter IX, where flipping forward a bit I know I’m going to have to dedicate a serious reading session to, and I just cannot find the time.
Ooh, I like this. I’m in!
Ooooh! I like how you think!
yes, but as far as I’m aware I don’t necessarily have ADHD? I do have autism, and there’s the suspicion I have ADHD, but I don’t have a paradoxical reaction to caffeine and also I’ve not been tested so who the fuck knows anything. My psychiatrist certainly doesn’t think testing is necessary.
All day, every day. Sometimes I will just delete everything and just not reply at all. Which sucks when I actually want to make use of comments and engage in the communities more. So far all the folks on here and the other instances I am on tend to not turn the focus onto my excessive use of parenthesis, and stay on the topic.
I am sure there have been some random one-offs. The only ones I can think of have been more about how I didn’t break things into paragraphs vs just one huge wall. Even then, it is obvious that they at least read most of it. And I try to take those the same as telling me I have something on my face vs not. Just depends on how they say it.
Don’t forget [Option A | Option B].
Primary thought; secondary (interjectory thought [aside]) thought, supporting thought that wouldn’t work as an independent sentence, digression: the actual point.
yeah, I’ve done that
ADHD life in a nutshell (because bonus thoughts are always worth it).
Since one email with {[()]} in it,I really force myself to cut back on that… Now it takes me three times as long to type a bloody answer to anything …
…i apologise for the long letter; i didn’t have time to write a shorter one…
I’m going to start using that!
Me too, next year.
I love it.
Lol, I did that too!
But people bitched abut it & about me being weird so now I just ((())) if it’s really needed (or if my brainhole just can’t/refuses to rephrase the text … or I ran out of fucks).
I send my work emails to my boss to proof read cause I can’t be trusted to be succinct and relevant (not that they force me to, I just overthink).
This is false (but sometimes true [unless it isn’t– and that’s possible (sometimes)])
Parenthesis is singular, parentheses is plural. One parenthesis, two parentheses. Like crisis/crises, axis/axes.
but, parentheses always comes in pairs.
if not someone needs to be executed
They sure do, unless you missed a parenthesis and somebody wants to point that out ;)
The op image incorrectly used the singular when they meant the plural
Smileys? :)? Unpaired?
Unless you specifically meant the side thought useYou might want to refer to the left parenthesis or the right parenthesis and then it would be incorrect to use the plural.
Parentheses are the
push()andpop()of my thought stack.Learning push/pop in the context of a stack provided me with a lifelong justification for being what others call “flighty”. This is super evident while doing chores and I jump from washing dishes to wiping counters to washing floors to putting laundry in the washer. To someone at that point it looks like I’ve started a bunch of things that I didn’t finish.
In fact, I paused on the dishes so I could clear a spot on the counter for them, realized I swept a bunch of crumbs on the floor that I needed to clean up, but before I could finish the floor I had to do something with that dirty pile of laundry that was in the way. Keep watching and you’d see me “pop” each of those tasks back off the stack in turn, eventually getting back to the dishes where I started.
I like this take on it. I’ve just been calling it my “if you give a mouse a cookie” mode
Is it fair to say people with ADHD add thoughts onto a stack while the rest of the population adds thoughts to a queue?
More like the thoughts are added automatically to the stack with little to no control.
You pop one off the stack but in doing so it opens up and a dozen springy toy snake thoughts burst out.
Yeah. So you pop one off the stack, but in processing that item, you push 10 more things on the stack. And the same happens when you pop one of those 10 items off the stack.
Stacks on stacks on stacks
📚
📚
📚Storing hobbies on racks on racks on racks.
Why haven’t I finished that task from eight weeks ago? I can’t tell you, or it will get even later.
I suspect it’s non-ADHD is linear, while ADHD is multi-dimensional mesh.
The thoughts are added to the ether and the ones that happen to make contact with the previous node become the next link.
lda
Wait, that’s an ADHD thing?
It isn’t unique to ADHD, but it is very common with ADHD. Pretty much everything that defines ADHD is something everyone does but dialed up to the point that it is a disorder.
It is (always has been).
—me, every time I read a post in this community
Removed by mod
I started using double dashes – like these right here – because then it feels more like an intentional pause with some neat stylistic touch.
Mostly, I just write like I talk.
That’s basically just em dashes, which these days will get you accused of being an LLM.
Only if you use a — instead of --, if they know what they’re talking about anyway.
My phone autocorrects them to — so that’s fun, lol.
Microsoft Word automatically converts a double dash to an em dash too
And Outlook. My quick sig is:
-- psud
But on Outlook it is
-- <ctrl-z>psud
