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T. R. Girill Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired) [email protected]
Technical Writing: Strategic Parentheses in Science Text
Parentheses () are among those "extra" punctuation marks that inexperienced technical writers often ignore. Or else they sprinkle parentheses on their text like salt on lunch, to add random zest. Most published advice on parentheses use in science, such as the Council of Biology Editors Style Manual, focuses strictly on how to punctuate near them (for example, on when a comma or quote mark goes inside or outside a closing parenthesis). Such correct punctuation provides useful signals of course, especially for ESL readers of technical text, but it overlooks entirely the communication benefits that a writer adds by using parentheses astutely. Even the Handbook of Technical Writing (St. Martins, 1976, p. 348) notes only that parenthetical material just "applies to the word or phrase immediately preceding it"--a striking yet empirically mistaken claim.
But WHY would any scientist bother to use parentheses? The real value of parentheses in technical text is strategic--to enrich the content of a writer's science prose, to make the text more useful to readers without overwhelming those readers. Of course, thoughtless parenthetical insertions can disrupt reading flow and thus undermine fluent comprehension. But near the very end of West and Turnbull's Scientific Papers Made Easy (Oxford, 2023), those two scientists offer three specific "bonus tips" for deploying parentheses strategically, to helpfully enrich one's scientific text for its audience.
Jargon Management
Choosing vocabulary appropriate for the audience is one way to increase a text's usefulness and decrease reader confusion. Sometimes a writer can "anchor" a plain assertion to a formal or extra technical term, using parentheses, so that readers meet that term or abbreviation--enrichment for future use--without being overwhelmed by it on first reading (p. 43). For example:
...we analyzed the data by Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), which compares continuous data between groups...
Interpretive Clues
Sometimes a verbal description or explanation can be easily, unambiguously connected to a diagram or figure to promote more reliable interpretation by calling out the linking visual features in parentheses in the nearby text (p. 74):
...the bacteriophage genome (blue) inserts itself into the bacterial genome (purple), where it replicates and is repackaged into the phage capsule (black)...
Supportive Data Tidbits
Sometimes data details are not really vital to understand a scientific explanation (of a procedure performed, for example) but they can lurk within parentheses to sharpen the explanation without overwhelming it (p. 23):
We cultured all strains under high (21%) and low (
The goal in all three cases here is to improve the text for readers hungry for revealing technical detail, without making the sentences more confusing or intimidating for those readers who do not need or want the extra parenthetical information. Fluent reading of technical text is always a challenge for students, so parenthetical enrichment like this must be used carefully, just like spices in cooking.
[For more on helping students prepare effective instructions, see http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/instructions For more on drafting good technical descriptions, see http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/analysisgd]
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