Using acronyms kindly
Fun fact: as a kid, and also well into adulthood, I used to get acronyms confused with acrostics. I had a moment during a uni tutorial that made me lose my grip on reality when the tutor said "Don't use acronyms unless you've explained what the letters stand for". And I looked condescendingly at my peers and thought "Maybe don't submit poetry in a news writing subject, ya dumb dawgs" before realising that, in fact, I was the dumb dawg.
So the first part of this lil lesson is more for me than for you: acronyms and acrostics are not the same.
The second part of the lesson is about *checks notes* acronyms. There are actually two subcategories of abbreviations - acronyms and initialisms. It literally doesn't matter if you comprehend this part because the way you format both acronyms and initialisms is the same but let's do a quick run through anyway.
Acronyms are when you use the first letter of each word (or a combo of letters) and pronounce it like any other word*. Like:
Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus - scuba
Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation - laser
Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart - captcha
An initialism is when you you create an abbreviation from the first letters of each word and them pronounce them like letters:
Federal Bureau of Investigation - FBI
Environmental Protect Agency - EPA
Public relations - PR
Okay good, interesting stuff. Why should you care? Because while both acronyms and initialisms let you communicate quicker, they can also confuse and isolate your audience if they're not across the meaning of the acronym.
For example, when emailing someone else in the creative/freelance/agency field, I might say “Deadline COB not EOD, please include PSD files in handover”. I mean tbh, I would never be that blunt but let's pretend.
EOD - end of day, COB - close of business, PSD - Photoshop document file.
And look, they might understand what I meant but there's a chance they won’t and my message would confuse them, make them feel like they're missing something, and rightfully think I'm a bit of a dickhead. What, am I so busy I can't write end of day?
There's an easy fix. Anytime you use acronyms, get into the habit of writing out the full phrase the first time you use it, followed by the abbreviation in brackets. For example, "Just got a reply from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) about my idea to develop an anti-gravity jigsaw puzzle to keep astronauts entertained during space visits. Sadly, they passed".
This is not a hard and fast rule as you should be able to intuit when explaining an abbreviation is going to be useful (like explaining the abbreviation of complex government agencies) vs. insulting (like explaining that Mr. stands for mister).
Remember to think about who you're writing to - would they reasonably know what the abbreviation means? If not, whack in the explainer. Easy peasy lemon squeezy (EPLS).
TL;DR? If you think your audience won’t know what an acronym is abbreviating, write the phrase out in full, followed by the acronym in brackets, the first time you use it in any communication.
*Over time, abbreviations can become accepted as words in their own right, like scuba and laser. And over even more time we lose sight of the original abbreviation altogether 👇
