Gogol called Dead Souls a poem. Not a novel - and who are we to tell him otherwise?
If you, the author, express your peculiar stops and verbal modulations better with use of complete sentences in brackets, you know better. Especially since that actually helps us to imagine the way you speak (as we now are kindly made partial to via your broadcasts).

We all have our small quirks of orthography and punctuation; I know mine (excessive use of semicolons and dashes), and have no desire to rein them in. Our multitudinous quirks can, naturally, trip over each other and stare at the offender in disbelief (thus, I’d rather distinguish the matrjoshka set of second brackets within the first with different configuration. [Just like that].) But them quirks are mostly peaceful folks and don’t quarrel for long. Unlike the dictating editors.

Tatyana.  Thank you.  (You are a very kind person.)

*the cuckoo praises the rooster [there must an English equivalent, derived jointly from La Fontaine, but that’s what I could come up with as a source at the moment]

Er, the edit made to your post is grammatically incorrect. WTF?

The older I get the more I despise the rules of grammar etc.  Perhaps that should read the people who try to enforce them.

The only thing that matters is that you are understood.

I disagree.  They are a routine writing procedure.

Indeed. And the inability to use them cramps my style a bit. I do perhaps overuse them a little, but the slight digression is a big part of my style. The other way I find them useful is when I am trying to explain something and I make a simplification. This can lead to some smart alec commenter jumping in with “Ha ha ha. It’s more complicated than that and you don’t understand it”, so a brief, deprecated digression in which I give a hint as to how it is more complicated than this but I am not going to explain it here can be useful.

Surely, though, if you are going to “correct” people who bracket complete sentences, there are only two ways of doing it. Either you remove the brackets but leave the sentence intact, or you delete the bracketed sentence entirely. The resulting text should still make sense in both cases, although the emphasis will be changed.

(I think another reason I perhaps overuse parenthesis comes from my being a mathematician and from having once been a certain kind of computer programmer, but that would be a digression).

Michael

I of course greatly value your support on this key issue.  But, shouldn’t that final full stop in your comment be inside the final bracket?

I do not agree (obviously) and I do not think entire parenthetical sentences are good English or (more importantly) necessary.

And who stopped writing for Samizdata because they did not like the guidelines?

I think actually that my placing the final period outside the closing bracket comes from my being that certain kind of computer programmer, too. There is some discussion of this kind of issue (although more in the context of quotes than parenthesis) in this broader discussion of English usage that is common amongst computer programmers here.

I think in this general issue I would add “what Patrick said”. The English language is a complex, growing and ever changing thing, and any rules that it has are very slippery, despite what our primary school teachers told us. English has many, many variants too, which one discovers more about when one travels. (The Asian variants are rising in importance, too, which is undoubtedly the most important current trend. But I digress).

The point of putting complete sentences in brackets is that this procedure enables you to flag up an interesting tangent, but then not fly off at it, while keeping the tangent separate from the main thread, which you can then pick up again without confusion about what the next sentence after the brackets is following on from.

Exactly. This is a matter of style and presentation, not grammar. I can’t believe anyone can think English is a logical language either.

Indeed Ian and I happen to think it is lousy presentation, which is why I depreciate it on Samizdata.

Opinions vary and I like a variety of them on Samizdata, but when it comes to presentation issues, that is an editorial matter and in such matters I believe in the concept of One Man, One Vote. I was the Man and I get the One Vote :-)

Well, that’s clarified things. He’s the One Man with a vote and I’m the One Man with a blog. :-)

And nice to see that the spirit of the newspaper sub is still alive and well in the blogging world…

The irony is that one of the Samizdata editors put me onto this from George Orwell.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The problem isn’t the rule. It is the inflexibility.

Imagine one of Shakespeare’s sonnets as it might be published on Samizdata.

Shall I compare thee you to a summer‘s day?
...
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
...
By chance or nature‘s changing course untrimmed;

I also wonder if we could have apostrophes abolished. I like “King’s Road” being renamed “King His Road” and “The Lion His Head Tavern.” Very retro.

VERY retro, Antoine. I’ve just double-checked my copy of the first proper map of Chelsea, a survey done in 1664 by my namesake James Hamilton, and even there it’s still “King’s Road” with the apostrophe.

“The King - His Head and Eight Bells” has a ring to it, and as the namechange would require reopening the place, I’m all for it.