Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

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.