Notation and conventions

Parentheses inside sentences I use to indicate optional words. The sentence may be read sensibly without the parenthesised portion. The parenthesised portions are intended to offer additional context.

In particular, they are often used to expand abbreviations
such as CFG (context-free grammar)
in their first use (or first use after a while).

For the other common use of parentheses, to wrap asides (or parenthetical statements) I use em dashes, written —. These are portions of sentences that somewhat deviate from the topic of the sentence. Note the difference between the em dash, —, and the hyphen, -, or the (occasionally used in my writing) en dash, – .

In a sentence containing an aside in the middle
—such as this one—
has the em dashes tightly wrapping the aside.
In case the aside ends the sentence, the trailing em dash is omitted
—as in this case.

e.g.

for instance

i.e.

that is

s.t.

such that

w/o

without

w.r.t.

with respect to

w/

with