Is it correct to use a tilde (~) in a paper as punctuation meaning ''sort of identical to"?

Question

In a paper I am writing (APA style), I have a sentence like this: > Another category of common sounds found across many languages are the palato-alveolar consonants (~siblants). These include... The meaning I want to convey is that palato-alveolar consonants are very related to siblants and I add the word 'siblants' in parentheses for laymen who may not be familiar with the term 'palato-alveolar consonants'. However, I do not want to just say > palato-alveolar consonants (siblants) because they are not totally identical. Is the usage of the tilde in this case acceptable in my paper? If not, are there any other ways I can convey this information?

Answer 1

My reference of APA format does not list the tilde symbol for useage Scholarly, I would avoid this symbol because it is used infrequently and the reader may not know what it means. If the reader stumbles when moving across this symbol the reader might lose interest. When writing my articles I found that explaining what I meant made it more clear for the reader.

I would explain what palato-alveolar consonants are exactly, before moving on to next paragraph.

Answer 2

Hi. It's not a ironclad rule but in prose writing the ~ symbol tends to come across as a stand-in for "something like" or even as a prefix version of "-ish".

In your example, it'd be okay to just write "palato-alveolar consonants (similar to sibilants)" or "palato-alveolar consonants (closely related to sibilants)"...

Hopefully that helps.