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Avoid informal use of 'besides' and 'as well'

Avoid using 'besides' and 'as well' when you mean 'also' or 'furthermore'.

Besides and as well are less suitable in scientific writing when used in isolation, i.e. before a comma or at the end of a sentence:

Less formal:

(1a) The ASFA-Ti clamp was specially designed for high-performance cars. Besides, it has applications in the marine, aeronautical, and chemical industries.

(1b) The ASFA-Ti clamp was specially designed for high-performance cars. It has applications in the marine, aeronautical, and chemical industries as well.

More formal:

(1c) The ASFA-Ti clamp was specially designed for high-performance cars. It also has applications in the marine, aeronautical, and chemical industries.

(1d) The ASFA-Ti clamp was specially designed for high-performance cars. Moreover, it has applications in the marine, aeronautical, and chemical industries.

Correct, formal use of besides and as well

However, both besides and as well as have a more formal style when they function as prepositions, combined with a noun:

(2) Besides the offloading approach for handling the computationally heavy tasks at the edge, another circumvention is to sacrifice the accuracy by reducing the amount of training data.

(3) We reduce the amount of training data, as well as handling the computationally heavy tasks at the edge.

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