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Parenthesis are for "taking a small detour from the current thought", either to add context or personal thoughts. I use em-dash (written as "--" because I don'

Parenthesis are for "taking a small detour from the current thought", either to add context or personal thoughts. I use em-dash (written as "--" because I don't have an emdash key on my keyboard) as punctuation that sits between a semicolon and a period.

xattt 7mo ago
It depends on the goal of your writing. You can usually set off the same thought with a comma or a semicolon depending on sentence structure. You can also just avoid the whole rigamarole and have a separate explanatory sentence. Times change, good writers adapt.