a/n: Guest chapter by my lovely friend Eliza, who doesn't write for K-pop but is a wonderful writer for other fandoms.

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Like we said before, if you have to use parentheses to explain a joke, the joke was about as funny as an old sponge (because an old sponge isn’t funny at all! Get it? Get it? Heh).

If a sentence doesn’t need parentheses, don’t use them. Parentheses should be used to add details that don’t belong or aren’t needed in the stream of the actual text. They can be snarky comments and jokes in themselves playing off the main passage, they can be explanations of things (not jokes!) or they can simply be honest-to-god details that you need to include but don’t quite fit, but please guys I am begging you USE THEM RESPONSIBLY. This is crack, so you can ramble excessively, but only do that if it’s for crack and you have to be VERY careful both to make sure that your meaning and humor are clear, as well as that rambling actually does work in that situation. Grammar still applies within a parenthetical phrase, and make sure you insert the period AFTER the LAST parenthesis when ending sentence with one (like this).

Now, I just used the word “parenthesis” and it probably looked weird to you. That’s because I used the singular form. THERE’S A REASON YOU ALWAYS SEE “PARENTHESES” IN PLURAL. Don’t send a fic into the world with unclosed parentheses. That’s like walking into a club with toilet paper stuck to your pants (and trying to pick up guys. It’s sloppy and really disconcerting. The reader gets totally stressed out looking for the end parenthesis, and it just keeps building because it isn’t there to find. In my experience, the human heart can’t take that much stress and the consequences could be fatal. Seriously, your readers will have a panic attack and die if you don’t close your parentheses. Since I don’t want YOU to have a panic attack and die, I’ll tell you that, just as a lesson, I’m not going to close them this time. But otherwise, even if it’s the end of a sentence or paragraph or whatever, you NEED to close your parentheses. Because if a reader has a panic attack and dies, they can no longer read your fic. And then you’ll be so upset from losing readers that you’ll have more unclosed parentheses, which will cause more readers to die, and eventually there will be a vicious cycle causing the list of your subscribers to look like the book from Death Note. DO NOT TURN YOUR CRACK CAREER INTO DEATH NOTE! (But if you do, please don’t write about me!)