How to write/format a digression in conference/thesis papers
Maybe you can format it as a remark. These are essentially paragraphs typeset with a special header, a bit like theorems. Example from a paper in my field:



Note that the text of the paragraph is typeset in a roman typeface, not in italic like a theorem. If you are using Latex, with amsmath, there is a command \theoremstyle{remark} that can be used to get theorem-like environments with that formatting.