Brackets—or square brackets, as they’re called by people who call parentheses “round brackets”—serve a limited but crucial purpose. First: If you find yourself making a parenthetical comment within a parenthetical comment, the enclosed parenthetical comment is set within brackets. But it’s extraordinarily unattractive on the page (I try to find a way around it [I mean, truly, do you like the way this looks?], at least whenever I can), so avoid it. Second: Any time you find yourself interpolating a bit of your own text into quoted material (a helpfully added clarifying first name, for instance,
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