Is your acronym dehumanising? Four reasons to think again.
Nothing looks less reader-friendly than a report full of initialisms or acronyms.[1] It is intensely frustrating and off-putting for the reader. It kills whatever tone you are going for and replaces it with a stuffy, officious-sounding tone.
And it’s ironic, really, because acronyms and initialisms are meant to help readers. They are meant to make it easier to read clunky collections of words that appear over and over again in a document. The eye can skim over a well-used initialism, with the brain doing its job of filling in the missing collection of words from nothing more than their initial letters.
But overused, there is nothing worse. The key as always is judicious and balanced use. Consider the following four questions every time you are tempted to use initialisms in your report.
1. Will you be using the initialism again?
We’ve all seen sentences like this:
All items on the shortlist were recorded on a quality assurance form (QAF).
Fine. ‘Quality assurance form’ is an unwieldly collection of words, and no doubt in the place of work being referred to, everyone called it a QAF. So it can save space on paper to write ‘QAF’ instead of the full phrase. But often when you see this type of initialism, it is a one-time affair. Never used again. So actually, instead of saving space on future uses, it actually just takes up space to tell readers the initialism. No one needs to know the initialism if you are not going to use it again.
2. Do you really need it?
I edited a long report recently, where the author had decided to make ‘household’ into the initialism HH. When you looked at a page, it was literally peppered with HHs standing out from their surroundings. The actual word ‘household’ would not have stood out like that. It is a regular, everyday word, it is relatively short, and more importantly – it is just one word!
No matter how many times you are goin2223g to use it, it is never a good idea to use an initialism for a word like this. Not only will it look clunky on the page, but it is actually more likely that your brain will stumble over its meaning, because we are not used to seeing single words or even very short phrases made into initialisms.
Other examples of unnecessary, short initialisms I’ve seen are team member (TM) and private sector (PS). Just use the words!
3. Does the sentence still make sense if you expand it?
This one is not so much about when to use an initialism as how. Consider a real example from a paper I edited a few weeks ago. The initialism, which to be honest I don’t love in any case, is ODF – ‘open defecation free’. It refers to communities in the developing world that have successfully installed toilet facilities and embedded their use among all residents, so no one defecates in the open and endangers water sources, health, and so on.
The problem is, with over-use, the initialism itself can seem to turn into an entity of its own. With its own grammatical micro-climate. Consider the following sentence:
Village A was among the last villages to achieve ODF.
Here, ODF is used as a noun in its own right – a state that has been achieved. The problem is, it actually stands for ‘open defecation free’ – an adjectival phrase. Let’s expand the initialism in our example sentence and see what it looks like:
Village A was among the last villages to achieve open defecation free.
Of course, this makes no sense. The brain says, ‘open defecation free what?’ Or, worse, it reads as though the village had achieved a state where everybody defecated in the open, and for no cost!
Don’t let your initialism take on ontologies of their own. Always remember what they stand for, and make sure they are always a grammatical fit with the sentence.
The editorial solution, incidentally, was to add the word status after ‘ODF’.
4. Is your use of an initialism problematic?
This is a bit of a vague question as all the above uses are problematic in their own way. Let me explain.
In another recent paper I edited, I came across the egregious initialism PWID. It stood for ‘people who inject drugs’. I immediately hated it and couldn’t quite put my finger on why. It was contrived, it felt more like an initialism of a sentence fragment than of a connected group of words.
These were good enough reasons to eliminate its use and reinstate ‘people who use drugs’ as an entire phrase throughout the paper. And then it hit me.
The initialism reduced the people in question to a homogenous clump of letters. Even reducing them to a homogenous group of ‘people who inject drugs’ is questionable, because they are all individuals, but this is understandably unavoidable in a context like this. But using an initialism makes it a hundred times worse. It completely takes away the sense of their humanity and individual identity.
People are at the heart of the stories told in the development sector, and so much of the work done is around inclusivity and giving people a voice. So stop and think before you designate a (clumsy, unnecessary) initialism or acronym to a whole group of people who share one characteristic. Try to keep their humanity intact in the reader’s mind, and your story – not to mention theirs – will be all the richer for it.
[1] Acronyms are initialisms that form a pronounceable word in its own right, such as AIDS, or NATO.