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>When to use acronyms & abbreviations, and when to write out in full?
Any general guidelines?
As a general rule, for an audience that is non-military and almost
certainly not otherwise in some way regimented, I eschew them. This
doesn't mean I avoid them totally. I like to strike a balance between
brevity and understanding.
You sort of shoot yourself in the foot if you use a lot of
abbreviations in an attempt to shorten your sentences, if nobody
remembers what the abbreviations mean. You might see if generic nouns
or pronouns won't work just as well. If you are in a passage that is
full of talk about an Automatic Gustatory Module (AGM), rather than
use the abbreviation, see if references to "the module" or "it"
wouldn't serve just as well for brevity or even better for
comprehension.
Just because you are a technical writer doesn't mean you are required
to write technical, ya know.
If the abbreviation or acronym is in the dictionary, or if it is the
short form of the subject of the manual or help program, then I use
it. But I start getting nervous and my sense of balance starts
sending me messages when I see more than a couple of abbreviations or
acronyms per paragraph or more than a few per piece.
I recently wrote a piece for some engineers, and of course the first
drafts were full of their favorite abbreviations and acronyms, and I
couldn't help but wonder whether all of this alphabet soup was going
to be understood by the target audience, and whether the brevity of
the abbreviations would cause a slowdown in reading comprehension
speed. So I knocked out a draft in which I spelled out everything or
substituted pronouns or generic nouns. I turned it in. As far as I
know, nobody flinched. I thought it was kind of cool. Minimalist
technobabble.
For role models, you might look to see how much technical stuff gets
written about in the general media with little or no use of
abbreviations and acronyms.
WinHelp and help for other platforms offer you the ability to write
glossary popups, and I like to use these popups once a topic. And of
course you can also add a glossary topic and glossary pushbutton.
Managing it gets to be a little work, though.
Bill Sullivan
bsullivan -at- deltecpower -dot- com
San Diego, California
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