.and thought she was the coolest, smartest [person]. I get the sentence, but why put person in those brackets? I've seen it done like that before and the sentence makes perfect sense without the brackets and makes almost no sense if you take out the bracketed word.So what are the brackets for
Brackets are tall punctuation marks used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. now thats confusing isn't it
Public schooling and community college in which I attended both:)
If that sentence is an extract from an interview or a speech or something like that, the brackets may be there to indicate that the actual sentence spoken by the source did not contain the word person, but that the meaning of the sentence is correct if you put the word in. For example, suppose the original sentence was I considered all the people in the room, and thought she was the coolest, smartest one. In this case, one means person, but you might not know that if the beginning of the sentence is omitted. Well, this is a pretty bad example, since it is obvious what one means, but I'm trying to work with the sentence you gave. You'll find reasonable uses of brackets like this in newspapers and magazines when they report on people's speech without quoting at length. They make up for the lack of context.
