You should define your own commands and then use them, in preference to directly using markup. For example, at the start of my essay on non-standard analysis, I define some commands:

- "\near" as a synonym for "\simeq"

- \newcommand{\hyp}[1][\mathbb{R}]{\prescript{*}{}{#1}}

- \newcommand{\powerset}{\mathcal{P}}

This way you can change the notation easily and all-at-once if you need to, as well as making the semantics clear to the source-reader.