period for reflection

(never mind the incongruity of using a decimalled imperial weight, and pay no attention to the heavy-handed invasion of commentary into someone's sovereign quote)

"...(it weighed 2.4lbs)."

)."

Although, personally, I'd replace the brackets with a semicolon (or maybe a period depending on emphasis).

forest pines otm.

but i'd replace the semicolon with an em-dash.

Me too - if its part of a spoken sentence an em-dash would read better than semis or brackets I think. Does this boil down to taste tho, or are there set rules? I never got a sense of concrete rules beyond "follow the style sheet" when I did editing.

If the phrase in parentheses is an authorial interjection and not part of quoted speech, it should be in square brackets: [].

Or, better, not inside the quotation marks at all.

"Once," Professor Cardamom said, "once of our students collected a mutant snail darter that, at the time, was the most massive ever captured. (It weighed 2.4 lbs.)"

Oops. Missed the part about commentary vs. parenthetical aside.
So "(it weighed 2.4 lbs)" is not Prof. C's utterance? Brackets are the right choice, then.

Also, italicize and precede with pretentious "n.b." The "n.b." should also be italicized and possibly followed by a dash. However, it should not be enclosed in quotation marks, as I have done.

Finally, remember: square brackets, except for the italicization, which requires them pointy ones and an "i" (but not actually in quotations) and some more pointy ones and there's a backslash goes in there, too, somewhere.

At your service; [as always]/

if the prof didn't say the bracketed bit, it wouldn't be inside the inverted commas

look at rjg, talking about commas.

like this, tracer - and you owe me a mail:

"Once," Professor Cardamom said, "one of our students collected a mutant snail darter that - at the time - was the most massive ever captured" [it weighed 2.4 lbs].

No. Sorry, but I'm incapable of letting this slide.

Either:

"Once," Professor Cardamom said, "one of our students collected a mutant snail darter that -- at the time -- was the most massive ever captured [it weighed 2.4 lbs]."

or, much better, something like:

"Once," Professor Cardamom said, "one of our students collected a mutant snail darter that -- at the time -- was the most massive ever captured." The mutant darter, we learned, had weighed 2.4 pounds.

Square brackets indicate that the material that they enclose is interjected.

hi suzy! check your email.

I have heard that parens are used to add information to a quote, and brackets are used when you are replacing or adding words strictly for clarity. Anybody else heard this one, or have I got it wrong?

Ctrl-s, just assume it needs to be interjected, like wot I said up at the top.

The thing that kills me here is that "lbs." is an abbreviation, and it seems that simply by the unhappy consequence of being shoved up against a quotation mark, a bracket and the end of a sentence, it loses its period!

I was taught that in quoted text, square brackets should be used for any text that wasn't part of the original.

FP, that's what I was taught too, but I get all kinds of grief when I edit something thata way. Bar-room brawling almost over parens v. square brackets. WTF?!?!?

Ahhh, style v. rules whacha gonna do?