7.36 Square Brackets, General

Square brackets, often simply called brackets, are more disconnective than parentheses. They are used to enclose material too extraneous for parentheses. Use brackets for editorial comments or additional information on material written by someone else. To use ordinary parentheses for this purpose would give the impression that the inserted words were those of the person quoted. Square brackets should also enclose translations given immediately after short quotations, terms and titles of books or articles. See 8.14 French and foreign-language quotations for detailed information and examples.

7.37 Use within parentheses

When one set of parentheses is to be placed within another, replace the inner parentheses with square brackets (though dashes may be used instead—see 7.33 Parentheses within parentheses). Parentheses within parentheses should be used sparingly, however, except in legal and scholarly texts and specifically for letters and numerals referring to subsections of a document:

• Acadia (from Algatem ["dwelling here and there"])
• (See section 14(i)(c))

Square brackets may also be used in place of round brackets where two or more sets of the latter would otherwise occur in succession:

• in 3(a) [according to Bixby’s enumeration] . . .
• Here, f(x) [c. s. 8.3] reaches a maximum when . . .

© Public Services and Procurement Canada, 2024
TERMIUM Plus^®, the Government of Canada's terminology and linguistic data bank
Writing tools – The Canadian Style
A product of the Translation Bureau