You know you're going too far when you're using square brackets

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)

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.

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

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.

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, ...

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.
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.
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?
- Scientist: Scientific findings are meaningless when taken out of context.
  Journalist: Scientist says scientific findings are meaningless!
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).

ADHD life in a nutshell (because bonus thoughts are always worth it).

This is false (but sometimes true [unless it isn’t– and that’s possible (sometimes)])

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.
- 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

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!
- 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).

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 use
- You 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() and pop() 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.
- 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

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.

You know i like to think I have it under control. No outbursts control over irritants etc and I think in doing pretty good. Then someone posts some shit like this and I'm all "get out of my head" . Nice to know I'm not the only one giving the brackets a work out.

You'll love German speakers then. In my experience they love bonus content thoughs as well as math equations in their thoughts like "=" for reframing a thought or "=>" for concluding a thought.

Not a German but I'm dutch so close I guess, and I pretty regularly use =/= and == in text. I picked up == from IT class, not sure about =/=

me and all my beautiful footnotes

That's the point where I go back and edit the first parenthesized block to be separated by a comma, semicolon, or dash, make it a separate sentence, or convert the inner parenthesis to a footnote.

My mrs wires entirely in parentheses - it’s subclauses all the way down. She’s not ADHD though, likely OCD.

learn to appreciate nested parentheses.
because some ideas are fractals of thought
- When she was finishing her thesis my number one line of advice was “could this subclause be a new sentence?”.

Read this to my husband.

Him: "I never know where the punctuation goes, so I rewrite it so the () are in the middle of the sentence and I don't have to worry about it."

Me: "I do that too!"

Him: (because we've been together almost 30 years) "I don't think we've ever talked about this."

I feel this so hard

There’s always an equivalent way using a more advanced sentence structure. Parentheses are just the lazy way / bad habit.

Example:

I went to the store this afternoon (I was out of milk) and I ran into an old friend.
I went to the store this afternoon because I was out of milk. There, I ran into an old friend.

I’m in this picture and I don’t like it

Hot damn (I'm so [so] "guilty" of this); seriously – it's no even (or odd) funny!

I feel like a semicolon or colon would be better here than parentheses

I find that semicolon connotes "Concept B follows from, but is distinct from, Concept A", while parens connote "Concept B follows from, and is intertwined with, Concept A".
Because all thoughts are intertwined.
- I find parenthesis are best when concept B is worth noting, but tangential to concept A, especially when the next few points are going to be back on the same track that A was on.
Why not all of the above?

Parawhat?

Oh