Okay, here’s something that’s been bugging me lately. If you’re writing prose fiction, you can do whatever you want; however, when it comes to technical writing – like, say, rules for a game – I’m seeing a whole lot of people abusing asides in ways that make the text difficult to follow. Absolutely, you should change things up for variety in your technical writing, lest you end up with something that reads like stereo instructions, but misusing asides can mislead readers about the context and importance of the information they contain.
A parenthetical aside (like this one) is meant for providing a brief example, clarification, or elaboration upon a concept that’s just been introduced or discussed. If you’re introducing or discussing new concepts, it should be part of the main body of the text. Clauses set off by endashes – like so – count as parenthetical for this purpose.
When you advise the reader to “note” something, you’re pointing out a potentially non-obvious application or edge case that’s already implicit in material previously discussed, and is being made explicit for the reader’s convenience. Note that, while this is a narrower remit than that of a parenthetical aside, the same general rule applies: if you’re introducing new material, you’re not noting something, you’re just saying it.
Similarly, when you tell a reader to “remember” something, it’s a callback to previous material that’s sufficiently separated from the current discussion that a refresher may be in order. On no account should you be demanding that the reader remember something you never told them in the first place! Remember: present new material directly, not as an aside.
Sidebars are for setting off discussions that are germane to the topic at hand, but would be disruptive to the flow of the main text. The trick is that sidebars are, themselves, disruptive: the reader may be unsure whether to read the sidebar first, or to continue with the main text and come back to the sidebar later, especially if the sidebar appears in the middle of a longer section. In most cases, a sidebar is like a parenthetical aside for a whole discussion rather than a particular sentence, and can be used for examples and elaborations that are too long or complicated to stuff into parentheses. If the material is too brief for a sidebar, but too tangential for a parenthetical aside, you might consider a footnote* instead.
Got it?
* Footnotes are also a safe place for self-indulgent snark, mostly because nobody actually reads them.
