Core Grammar

_________ are dramatic punctuation marks. They attract far more attention that commas and parentheses.

Dashes

When you insert dashes into a sentence, place them adjacent to the words they separate; do not place spaces on either side of the dash.

EX: correct My client-who spent two weeks in the hospital-has recovered. Incorrect: My client - who spent two weeks in the hospital - has recovered.

_________ are groups of words that can stand alone as a sentences. An independent clause contains a subject, a verb, and a complete thought.

Independent clauses

__________ signal that the information contained in them is merely incidental. Lawyers do not like to be weighted down with a great deal of incidental information. Furthermore, parenthetical interruptions can be distracting to read.

Parentheses

_______ phrases should be used only occasionally in formal writing and only if you are sure that you want the reader to consider the interruption to be secondary to the main part of the sentence.

Parenthetical

True or False: Lawyers use parentheses more commonly in emails and causal notes to mark incidental information. In those settings, the reader is less likely to be distracted by them or frustrated by the tangential nature of the material contained in them.

True

A good rule of thumb: re: dashes

Use dashes (rather than commas or parentheses) to set off an interruption that you want to draw attention to.

Dashes can be though of as the opposite of parentheses: they set off text that is _____ to the point

crucial

Adding a ______ where the period used to be combines two independent clauses - groups of words that could stand alone as sentences - into one sentence.

semicolon ;