Writing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
How do I format an in-text citation in MLA format when the sentence ends as a parenthesis?
For example: Stuart Appleby won three races in his career (but lost all others) (Fredricks 23).
It looks weird having the two parenthesis next to each other. What is the correct method of citation without removing the parenthesis in the sentence?
From help/FAQ at the MLA Style Center link, under the question "How do I eliminate back-to-back parentheses in a sentence?"link the advice is to re-word the sentence so that the parentheses are not neighboring each other:
Original:
The General Franco Institute published the most important Spanish colonial work on Andalusi music, Patrocinio García Barriuso’s La música hispano-musulmana en Marruecos (“Hispano-Muslim Music in Morocco”) (1941).
Revised:
In 1941, the General Franco Institute published the most important Spanish colonial work on Andalusi music, Patrocinio García Barriuso’s La música hispano-musulmana en Marruecos (“Hispano-Muslim Music in Morocco”).
A similar case is covered at the end of "How do I punctuate a quotation within a quotation within a quotation?"link
The same principle applies when you need to incorporate parenthetical material. Alternate between parentheses and brackets, as in this aside:
(Early in The Namesake, the narrator explains that “[t]hough Gogol doesn’t know it, even Nikolai Gogol renamed himself. . . . [He had also published under the name Yanov, and once signed his work ‘OOOO’ in honor of the four o’s in his full name]” [Lahiri 97]).
