[blakehawkins]

People write like they read and speak, which is where this mistake comes from

The right way is to replace the parentheses with a pair of dashes, one before and one after the deemphasized clause

[lisper]

Or just remove the parens. They don't really add (much of) anything. (See what I did there?)

Or maybe:

"... trying (unsuccessfully) to succeed..."

[ChaseRensberger]

I think these are all really good points. I certainly need to improve at my article writing abilities. I have removed the parentheses from the title.

[ghaff]

Probably em-dash in a formatted document rather than pair of hyphens like I'd use here. I'm pretty sure there are some stylistic recommendations about parens vs. em-dashes. I probably used to overuse parens but, in spite of being on my company's style committee for almost 15 years, I'm not sure I was ever all that consistent and I'm not sure we had hard and fast rules.