I have a new pet peeve—acronyms.
A couple of months ago I wrote the author of an online article, castigating him for using acronyms in his article and never spelling them out. Good writing practice would be to give both the spelled-out form and the acronym for the first occurrence of the term; then subsequent occurrences can use just the acronym.
But unfortunately too many writers assume we are familiar with the acronym. Just today I saw PMP and didn't know what it meant. And, still today, I saw NWS, but was able to figure that one out, largely from the context—National Weather Service. And I've had the experience of having to figure out an acronym or at least hunt pretty hard for the full form a couple other times within the last few days.
Certain fields are notorious for talking in "alphabet soup." That's fine, as long as the readers as well as the writers are clued in and speak the same language. But, rather than assuming that your reader can follow you, a writer should do as I said above, give the spelled-out form the first time.
And I won't even go into the usage of the military, where acronyms like NORAD and collapsed forms of words like noncom (non-commissioned officer) are the norm. George Orwell, in his novel 1984 (written in 1949) called such usage "newspeak." He portrayed it as one of the tools of his fictional totalitarian society. I don't think the usage of bureaucrats and technocrats has gotten any better in this respect since Orwell's day.
Anyway, what I have recourse to (and recommend to my readers) is an immensely useful website, www.acronymfinder.com.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment