I see this pretty often, and simply sigh and correct it, marking up the newspaper, book or whatever. But I just ran across a fresh example this minute and thought I'd pass it on. From an article about still-falling housing prices:
One big unknown for the housing market is the level of so-called shadow inventory — unsold homes that big banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own but haven't put on the market as well as soon-to-be foreclosed houses.
I'm not really fulminating indignantly, for I catch myself doing it almost as often. But when proofreading for clients, I tell them: With any parenthetical remark, whether you start it with a parenthesis, a comma or a dash, you must end it the same way. Thus the second punctuation mark is required in each of the following examples:
- A newspaper editor in Providence, RI, wrote that…
- My mother, who's always and forever telling me to enunciate, caught herself the other day...
- It seems to me—though I confess that I know very little about it—that when you write thus...
- Generally (though there are exceptions) you must always....
- One big unknown for the housing market is the level of so-called shadow inventory — unsold homes that big banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own but haven't put on the market — as well as soon-to-be foreclosed houses.
Hmm. It's belatedly occurred to me that Steve Goldstein of MarketWatch intended soon-to-be-foreclosed houses as part of the definition of so-called shadow inventory. If so, a comma might have been clearer but Goldstein wasn't actually wrong after all. In that case the only thing I see to complain about is a missing hyphen in "soon-to-be foreclosed houses".
So, never mind.
Actually, isn't there a difference whether I use parentheses or not? After all, I do not close the comma separated statement at the end of the sentence thusly, ",.", nor the dash, "—.", but I do close with the parenthesis, ").".
Emmett
As written, the "soon-to-be foreclosed (sic) houses" would be part of the appositive. But it isn't entirely clear if that is what the author intends. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt! I can check with some colleagues on that.
By the way, I would prefer "soon-to-be-foreclosed-on houses."
Of course you're right, EmmetRedd; I was assuming a phrase that is set apart (so to speak) from the rest of the sentence, but if the parenthesis comes at the end then there needn't be a closing comma or dash.
"Soon-to-be-foreclosed-on"? My initial impression is something like yuck!, but I can't define why. Is it just the old impulse not to end a phrase with a preposition? I don't think so.
Hmm...what's the proper object of "foreclose"? Do you foreclose the mortgage, and thus foreclose on the house?