With the NCAA basketball tournament and its brackets the talk of March, it seemed like the right time of year to write about brackets (as used in writing). Brackets are generally reserved for when the writer interjects something. You see it a lot in journalism. If someone says “that guy’s a monster” about Mr. Smith, it is often reported as “he said [Mr. Smith] was a monster.” The most common use of brackets is as the way to put parenthetical information inside parentheses: We found an increase (though the sample was admittedly small [N = 10]).
