Acronyms after an executive summary?

Subject: Acronyms after an executive summary?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com, "Westbrook,Beth" <beth -dot- westbrook -at- dhs -dot- state -dot- tx -dot- us>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 09:29:50 -0500

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)





References:
Acronyms After an Executive Summary: From: Westbrook,Beth

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