by Jennie Ruby
Nearly every piece
of technical writing has acronyms. Yet they can be a barrier to a reader who is
trying to absorb technical information or to a learner who is encountering new
terms for the first time. Of course most editors know to spell out an acronym
on first use and introduce the acronym in parentheses. For example, below is a paragraph similar to the
paragraph you are reading now, but using acronyms:
be a problem for readers of technical writing (RTW) and LENTs (learners
encountering new terms for the first time). LENTs may have a hard time
understanding the terms themselves and be very confused by UOA. Even advanced
RTW can forget quickly how to understand the UOA by memorizing what the A's
meant, and try to refresh their memory by scanning the document to locate the
first UOA. Thus even carefully defined A's and responsible UOA can still be a
problem.
What can we do to help the
reader? First, consider not using acronyms but spelling out words and phrases
even if they are repetitive. Limit the use of acronyms to technical terms for
which knowing the acronym is important in its own right. For example, in web
design the abbreviation CSS is used more often than the name it stands for,
Cascading Style Sheets. The reader needs to know that acronym as part of
understanding the topic.
Second, consider providing a
separate list of acronyms as a glossary. The reader can then refer to one
common source for all of your acronyms, rather than paging back through your
text trying to locate the parentheses where you first defined each one.
Third, use the same method
to define every acronym. In the sample paragraph above, I defined LENTs
backward, giving the acronym first, and then its definition in parentheses. The
reader will have a harder time locating the acronym when it is defined this
way.
Fourth, don't assume that if
you have introduced a long acronym, the reader will understand you if you then
use a small part of that acronym alone, as I did in the example with A's,
meaning acronyms, which was defined only as part of UOA.
Fifth, do use a small s to make an acronym plural, like this:
ATMs. If the acronym would look like another word with the s, add an apostrophe
like this: A's.
Sixth, when you introduce
the acronym, make sure it is not a possessive or a plural. If necessary, reword
the sentence: instead of "Internet Explorer's (IE's) browser window is…" try
"The browser window of Internet Explorer (IE) is…"
Note: Acronym actually means an abbreviation that
uses first letters of words and that is pronounced as a word, like NASA, versus
an initialism, which is any
abbreviation made up of first letters, like USS. However, Webster's lists
initialism as a secondary meaning of acronym, probably because so many people
lump them together, as I have chosen to do in this article.
***
to her credit. She is a publishing professional with more than 20 years
of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.
Jennie teaches two classes popular online classes: Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts and Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an excellent online 