...I once asked an English teacher of English in England about a sentence where I wasn't sure about the placement of a comma. So I asked him, "Should I put a comma here?" His reply was, "If you want to..."
Now that amounts to about 99% of my grammatical knowledge, the rest I make up as I go along, mostly based on feeling and/or intuition (and often enough wrong).
About kickstart's post, where he said that () are unnecessary. I would agree if it where in a formal context, but comment boards and usenet newsgroups are different. People tend to write more like they would speak and using brackets conveys some additional meaning to the phrase. It's like some idea you also want the sentence to represent, but you don't want to include it completely into the flow of the sentence.
Or something. And on other days it just rains. |
