[access-uk] Re: A Braille question about round and square brackets
- From: "Jackie Cairns" <cairnsplace@xxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:54:20 +0100
Thanks very much George, most informative and helpful.
I've now sent the final practice paper off, so let's hope the brackets are in
the right context. They look ok to me but ... well you never know. (smile.)
Has anyone else done this exam? I'd just be interested to hear how you got on,
and what you thought of it.
Jackie
Email: cairnsplace@xxxxxxx
Skype Name: Cairnsplace
----- Original Message -----
From: George Bell
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2008 1:22 PM
Subject: [access-uk] Re: A Braille question about round and square brackets
My apologies, Jackie. It is indeed dot 3 to close. Unfortunately "British
Braille", which is my own braille Bible, doesn't use the Simbraille font when
displaying braille, and so at a quick glance visually, 3 and 6 can look the
same.
To expand a little on the question of brackets, there are in fact three main
types. The round ones, square ones an curly ones.
Round brackets are the most popular and generally used to add information.
For example, "By using lower g (dots 2,3,5,6), we are indicating a bracket of
some kind."
Square brackets in editorial type content, are often used to fill in unspoken
words. For example, "My own [wife] says I'm nuts". However, in computer
parlance, they are often used to embrace text which may for some reason require
to be treated (or not treated) specially. If you look at every Subject line on
this list, you will see "[access-uk]". By having this in square brackets, the
system is able to sort subject lines, and ignore the list name. So in theory,
I could have messages from 8 different lists, sorted by subject, regardless of
what was in square brackets in the Subject line.
There's quite a good explanation of both the above at
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/bracket.htm which is worth looking
at from a journalistic point of view.
Finally Curley brackets. These were originally used where you wanted to put
brackets round two or more lines such is in mathematical expressions, but these
days they tend to be used for all manner of purposes, though mostly in computer
programming as a form of delimiter character.
George.
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