Avoid alphabet soup

7 ways to get the acronyms and abbreviations out

Seattle investigator J.P. Beaumont, a character in J.A. Jance’s Partner in Crime, tells this story:

The idea that an organizational program might be named after excrement hardly screams fiction. One of my clients swears that someone in her shop named a company program only to change the appellation when the acronym turned out to spell FECES.

The problems with acronyms

Acronyms appear to speed communication. After all, if you can boil a multisyllabic pileup of words down into a handful of letters, that moves information faster, right?

Wrong.

“[Unfamiliar acronyms] create false economies,” write the editors of the SEC’s A Plain English Handbook. “They may save a few words, but they may also frustrate and force the reader to take more time and effort to understand the document.”

Besides, copy cluttered with acronyms is visually off-putting to readers because it looks as if it’s written in code.

How to handle acronyms

Here are 7 ways to avoid drowning your readers in alphabet soup:

1. Use familiar acronyms. If the acronym is more familiar to your audience than the original term, go for it.

“REITs,” for instance, is fine when you’re writing to a group of real estate investors.

Abbreviation not familiar to your audience? Skip it. As The Associated Press Stylebook counsels:

“NNCBTPSNBRTASTSAFW.” *

* “Names not commonly before the public should not be reduced to acronyms solely to save a few words.”

2. Use a generic instead of an acronym. Generics like “the program,” “the policy” or “the plan” often make perfect substitutes for corporate acronyms. So assign a generic word to substitute for the original phrase:

• Instead of AABC on second reference for Auxiliaries and Activities Business Center, make it the center.
• Instead of SMICE for Secondary Market Intermediary Commodity Exchange, make it the exchange.
• Instead of LFAF for longitudinal functional analysis framework, make it the framework.

3. Define abbreviations, don’t just spell them out. That’s what Warren Buffett did when he wrote in one of his letters to Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders:

“These losses are called IBNR, for incurred but not reported. Indeed, in some cases (involving, say, product liability or embezzlement) the insured itself will not yet be aware that a loss has occurred.”

4. Don’t let acronyms congregate. It’s not necessarily any one acronym, but a collection of them that makes readers’ eyes glaze over. David Harris Lewis, an Entergy spokesperson and one of my favorite correspondents, sent me this headline and deck “for your collection of truly bad headlines”:

“Now, where was I?” Dave writes. “Oh, yeah, managing my supply chain.”

5. Don’t use acronyms for multipage pieces. Writing an annual report? Skip the acronyms.

The reason: Readers don’t necessarily read publications in the order you assembled them, so each page needs to stand on its own. Spelling out an acronym on page two is no help to readers who begin reading at page 22.

6. Decipher alphabet soup. Get help explaining acronyms with The Acronym Finder or Abbreviations.com. Both are comprehensive databases of acronyms, abbreviations and initialisms.

7. Make up your own acronyms. When the SHIT and FECES start to fly, some of my friends at FedEx start making up their own acronyms. They’ll mention TLA and FLAW and watch their colleagues try to puzzle out what they mean.

Those acronyms, of course, stand for three-letter abbreviation and four-letter acronym word.

____

Sources: The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, Perseus Books Group, July 15, 2002

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, A Plain English Handbook: How to create clear SEC disclosure documents (PDF), August 1998

Ann Wylie, Start Making Sense, Wylie Communications Inc., 1997