Mabfan's Musings

Although I use them all the time. More spicifically, I hate the parallel sets of punctuation rules that go with them, which fouled up several of my college papers. English papers require MLA format, while Education (and pretty much everyone else) require either APA or Chicago Style. Now, it's possible I was dumb and didn't pay close enough attention, but I'm pretty sure MLA differs wildly from the other two, in terms of how you punctuate inside and outside of the parenthetical statement, and how the parenthetical statement should fit in with the rest of the sentance. It's pretty clear that in this case, the punctuation/grammer was incorrect, but I would not be at all surprised if there's some obscure format out there that says you MUST preface every parenthetical statement with a semi-colon. The reason behind this, of course, would be to cause every editor in the world to start scratching his/her head.