Writing Tip

Abbreviate Groups of Words with Care

Difficulty Level: Intermediate

Recommendation: Use abbreviations for optimal reading.

What is the difference between an acronym and an initialism?

In the thumbed pages of PEAC lore is embedded a parable about the virtue of beautiful, mellifluous abbreviations. PEAC engineers had invented a contraption to generate voltage sags in situ to determine the ability of industrial equipment to ride through voltage sags of various magnitude and duration. The Process Ride-Through Evaluation System was quickly dubbed the PRTES. Is this an acronym? No. It is an initialism, which is an abbreviation formed by the initials of the name of something. Each letter in an initialism is pronounced separately. So, like a machine gun, we say P – R – T – E – S—five ugly-sounding choppy sounds. But wait. We had technology, but we also had creativity. We recognized the marketing inferiority of this cobbled brand name. So, we innovated a new abbreviation: the PortoSag. Is this an acronym? Yes. It is an abbreviation made from parts of the name of something that you can pronounce. In this case, our source is the name Portable Sag Generator. Brilliant.

Avoid Unnecessary Initialisms

We have seen how initialisms can be hard to say, especially when the letters sound similar, such as DTDTN. Try hard to resist the facile creation of an initialism. Instead, make an acronym out of them. Here’s a good example. Let’s say that the name of your utility is Detroit Edison Company. Now, you want to abbreviate it, and so you robotically grab the first letter of each word and glue them together (I’m a recovering robot—myself). When a reader encounters DEC, he is likely to pronounce each letter: Deee Eeee Ceee, which is bad because there are three like-sounding letters. But, what if you add a lower-case “o” to the end: DECo. Suddenly, we have created an acronym, an abbreviation that we pronounce as a word: Decko. Enable the speech mechanism!

Abbreviations: Plurals and Years

When you pluralize an abbreviation, don’t use an apostrophe. It is LTCs, not LTC’s. It’s CFLs, not CFL’s. In a perfect world, we would pluralize UPS as UPSes. But, just adding the “s” reflects the world we live in. Likewise, years pluralized to indicate a decade do not take apostrophes: 1980s, not 1980’s.


Fun Facts about Front and Back Formations, and a Freak

Front formations are created by extracting the front of the word: Chris from Christopher.

Back formations are created by extracting the back of the word: Tina from Christina.

Recursive acronyms are playful nerd-crafted whatchamacallit things—well, here, consider the acronym LAME:

L = LAME
A = Ain’t
an
M = Mp3
E = Encoder. That’s right. The acronym is part of the acronym itself. The “L” in “LAME” stands for “LAME.”


Use the Abbreviations That You Establish (or Don’t Establish Them in the First Place)

When you establish an abbreviation of a phrase, use it or lose it. For example, consider this at the beginning of a document: “A home area network (HAN) requires the use of a separate antenna embedded within the smart meter.” If you continue to use the term “home area network” and do not use its abbreviation, then don’t establish the abbreviation in the first place. Sometimes, the abbreviation is more widely known than the unraveled term. For example, very few people know what Scuba stands for (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), but you may want your audience to know that you know.

Avoid Establishing Abbreviations in Heads and Captions

I’m testing this bit of advice. Traditionally, you should not introduce an abbreviation in a head or caption, probably because they show up in tables of contents. “Power Quality (PQ) and Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC),” as a head, should be “Power Quality and Electromagnetic Compatibility.” Then, upon first use in the running text, set up the abbreviations. Any antitheses out there?

Don’t Spell Out Abbreviations Too Often

Spell out an abbreviation once, and then use the abbreviation freely thereafter. You may want to do something like this as a compromise: Spell it out in the abstract, spell it out in the report summary, spell it out in each chapter, and spell it out in each appendix.