I think the best way to remove all ambiguity is to write

is often used to mean the same thing, but in some contexts it is used to mean the composition of logarithms,
.
and
and
could all mean the same thing - the logarithm of the quantity
. For real, non-zero
, this is equivalent to
, but this is not true for either of the squared- or compound-logarithm interpretations.
very clearly shows what's being squared