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In article <1ec221INNi41@GIRAFFE.ZOO.CS.YALE.EDU>, schwarz-marc@cs.yale.edu (Marc Schwarz) writes:
|> What is the preferred style for parenthetical expressions?
|>
|> I have seen:
|>
|>    1. Mary had a little lamb (and the doctor died of shock).
|>
|>    2. Mary had a little lamb (The doctor died of shock.).
|>
|>    3. Mary had a little lamb. (The doctor died of shock.)
|>
|> This is actually two questions:  Should parentheticals
|> be dependent or independent clauses?  In addition, should
|> independent parentheticals be embedded within another
|> independent clause? (This presumes paretheticals should,
|> in most cases, be independent clauses.) In practice, I tend
|> to use the first example, the notion being that an independent
|> clause can stand on its own (no matter how tangential it is).
|>
|> Marc.
|> -=-
|> schwarz@cs.yale.edu
|> AKA schwarz@spunky.cs.nyu.edu

Where I work, parentheticals traditionally contain clarifying
information, an example, a citation for another work, or a reference to
material elsewhere in the document. Usually, parenthenticals are either
independent clauses or complete sentences.  This is a matter of
convention here, though; I'm not aware of any hard and fast rule. We do 
it this way to be consistent with each other.

As a software company, we have a number of rules for using parentheses 
in equations and in code. If we refer to a symbol in text, we usually 
show the symbol in parentheses, such as:

"..Logical operators include the equal sign (=),...."

For parentheticals within sentences, we punctuate outside of the 
parentheses, as in:

"..You can specify a quoted literal containing embedded commas (for example, 
"1,000.00"). And so on...."

Complete parenthetical sentences are punctuated within parentheses, such 
as:

"...The BLAH= option produces a separate report. (The BLAH statement 
produces a message in the error log.) And so forth..."

What you do, of course, is completely up to you. 
<-------------------------------^------------------------------------->
|Len Olszewski, Technical Writer| "The fish."                         |
|saslpo@unx.sas.com             |  -Salvador Dali                     |
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| Opinions this ludicrous are mine. Reasonable opinions will cost you.|
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