Is elaborating the opposite case in brackets acceptable and clear?
Is Sentence A an acceptable and clear way of shortening Sentence B?
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Sentence A:
A firm outperforms (underperforms) the industry when expression (1) results in a positive (negative) value.
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Sentence B:
A firm outperforms the industry when expression (1) results in a positive value, and underperforms the industry when expression (1) results in a negative value.
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3 answers
If you are writing a paper in a context where the type of shortening in A is a recognized device for the kind of contrast you use in B, then you can use it.
Personally, I've never seen anything like it before—and I've worked on papers across a wide range of academic and technical genres.
To me, when reading the first sentence, it simply seems contradictory and confusing. It reminds me of somebody with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other shoulder, where the angel is speaking but the devil occasionally interjects with parenthetical opposites. In other words, the parenthetical words read like sarcastic statements, denying, or at least questioning, the validity of what's actually being said.
Had I not gone on to read B, I would have had to work at understanding what A was trying to express for far more time than had I read a simpler sentence. Brevity does not always equate to simplicity.
You save some words with A, but, unless you're certain that the device is known to the reader, you risk their confusion. Although I don't think B really needs to be shortened in the first place, there are other ways it could be done.
Such as:
A firm outperforms the industry when a positive value results from expression (1)—and underperforms when a negative results.
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If you're certain you want to shorten the sentence in that way, the word 'respectively' would be be a very useful tool for clarifying what grammatical role is being played by each of the bracketed sections. In your case, I would write the sentence as:
A firm outperforms (or underperforms) the industry when expression (1) results in a positive (respectively, negative) value.
This is probably best used when the context is relatively formal/academic where readers are more likely to expect and understand this structure.
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It is acceptable, this kind of thing is done often in academic papers (to save space, there is often a page-limit in journal articles); but (B) is more clear than (A), that is probably why it was written that way.
Unless saving a handful of words is very important, stick with (B).
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