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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/38567
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I occasionally use parentheses in scientific writing when a piece of information is related to a previous statement but not to the central story.

Is it bad style in scientific writing to use parentheses that contain more than a handful of words or even full sentences?

For example, would the following paragraph be better without the first pair of parentheses (but with the parenthesized sentence in the same position)?

> We use a fleeblesheemed plumbus to analyze floob concentrations in groat dairy. (Despite the similar name, this idea is not related to the plumb-o-fleeb machine of Kimble et al., which is used as a krimkram lubricator for the production of shleem films in anorganic blamf synthesis.) The fleeblesheeme coating, which we apply at 142° Celsius, sensitizes our plumbus to groat dairy when submerged in the floob of their yeanlings for three to four minutes. After a short cooling period, the floob coefficients can then be read off the plumbus' dingle bop. To accelerate the subsequent re-hydration, we follow the warming scheme of Grumbles. The necessary optimization steps are discussed in Section 2. Finally, in Section 3, we apply our fleeblesheemed plumbus to 2016 floogro (714.A314). Contrary to previous belief, we find that floob concentrations stay below hazardous levels, when consumption occurs around midnight without direct exposure to noom radiation.

As an alternative, I could move the content of the parentheses to the end of the paragraph. At this point, however, they would lose their function to prevent readers from possible confusion.

Original score: 5