Acronyms after an executive summary?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Beth Westbrook wondered: <<When an acronym is spelled out in an 
executive summary, should it also be spelled out on first mention in 
the actual body of the document?>>

The traditional advice to spell out an acronym only on its first 
appearance in the text relies on a big assumption: that readers will 
read the entire document, and will do so sequentially, from the first 
page to the last. This assumption is invalid in many cases, and for 
many modern audiences; people simply don't read as extensively as they 
used to.

The trick is to think about the situation from the reader's standpoint: 
the "executive" may only read the summary, but others may skip the 
summary and go directly to the sections of the larger document that 
interest them. That being the case, there's some reasonably good 
justification for spelling out an acronym in each _section_ that you 
strongly expect will be read independently of the rest of the document. 
That's particularly true for unfamiliar acronyms whose meaning is 
crucial to understanding: why risk misunderstanding simply for the sake 
of saving a few letters?

How good is the justification to redefine? For online information, I'd 
treat each individual "topic" as if it were an independent document, 
and redefine the acronym. For that matter, I'd only use the acronym if 
the phrase it replaces were to appear several times in the same 
"topic". If the acronym is crucial to understanding and must be used to 
save space, a popup definition might be a good alternative.

For printed material, this decision becomes much more subjective and 
arbitrary. How can you tell what readers will and won't read? How can 
you tell whether they've encountered the acronym before? The answer is 
that you often can't. A better solution might be to include an acronym 
glossary, or a pointer within the index that leads to the definition. 
For short documents, defining the acronym once in the summary (or 
abstract) and once in the introduction may suffice. When I edit 
multi-author books such as symposium proceedings, I recognize that each 
author's chapter is likely to be read independently, and thus redefine 
acronyms in each chapter.

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)