: Using uncommon abbreviations Something which I see all the time in (popular) science writing is the use of abbreviations to indicate concepts. For (a made up) example: So when we're dealing

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Stanislaw Lem had a very nice method for that. Read his "Observation on the Spot" for it, although I'm not sure if translation captures the spirit.

In essence, the acronyms compose into meaningful, half-meaningful, humorous, horribly misspelled, rudely suggestive and otherwise very memorable words.

So when we're dealing with SuperChronistic Mechanics (SuC-Me) we have to take a wholly different approach than before in the case of Temporally InterTransmissive Area Oligarchs (TIT/AreOli). Those in favour of SuC-Me in fact frequently disagree with the conclusions reached by applying TIT mechanisms to the same data set...

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If you use a lot of abbreviations that may not be familiar to the reader, then readers may find they have to continually refer back to see what they mean. But if you don't use abbreviations, the text can get tedious and very repetitive-sounding.

Like -- let me see if I can make up a couple of sentences to illustrate:

The Warp Drive Autonomous Decontamination Peripheral (WDADP) can prevent your ship's engines from failing. A WDADP keeps foreign particles out of the engine. Most WDADPs are made from titanium alloys. Be sure to check your WDADP monthly. A well-maintained WDADP ... etc

Try re-writing that paragraph, but spelling out WDADP. It becomes terribly wordy and awkward.

On the other hand, every now and then I come across a sentence that's practically one long stream of abbreviations. "FTP your ASPX files to the IIS server before starting the CRON task on the LINUX box" and the like can be very intimidating to someone who doesn't use these abbreviations every day. (Every now and then I read a sentence filled with such abbreviations and get a chuckle from the fact that I understood it completely despite its obscurity.)

Personally, when I have a long technical term that is used repeatedly in a document, I'll abbreviate it with an explanation on first use. If I expect an abberviation to be very familiar to my target audience, I'll use it without hesitation and often without explanation. But if something is likely to be unfamiliar and only turns up a couple of times, I spell it out.

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I was reading a history book recently that demonstrated this very problem - it was littered with abbreviations that were only explained in the first instance they were used. I constantly had to keep going backwards and forwards through the book to remind myself what they were.

The author really should (in my opinion) have put a complete glossary of abbreviations in the back of the book for ease of reference.

If a book uses a lot of unfamiliar abbreviations a glossary is the way to go.

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IBM is a bastion of abbreviation use. Three-letter acronyms (TLAs) are literally the foundation of the company -- along with the misnomer calling all abbreviations acronyms (even ones that don't spell out a new word).

In IBM style, even cutting edge research papers and journal articles used the "define on first reference" rule for new terms and abbreviations. The argument was that, once ingrained, an abbreviation speeds comprehension. My feeling always was that authors used the technique to shorten writing time more than as a way to help their readers. Sentences ended up looking like alphabet soup.

In this age of digital content, it is a little easier to search back for the first reference, but this still "impedes progress" as David points out. The idea of a list of abbreviations used in a piece was never common practice, but it absolutely should have been. (Of course, in HTML each reference to an abbreviation can be tagged so that, in many browsers, a pop-up appears with the abbreviation, obviating the need for a search. Authoring can be done using software that matches the term against a global taxonomy so that the accurate description of even the most uncommon abbreviation is always used.)

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If they are abbreviations which are extremely common to the field, once per work is often enough to define them. If they are rare, invented for the piece, or really jargon, I would say once per section (once per chapter, once per web page).

Alternatively, a list of acronyms at the beginning or end of a piece might also be helpful.

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