As a commenter noted in my previous post on how not to give a presentation, I have another complaint about software development presentations that I didn't list. They're chock full of meaningless acronyms. SOAP, BI, SOA, RDBMS, SGML, CRUD, RMS, RDBMS, XML, ORM, FAQ. I appreciate the need for brevity on slides, but can you at least have one slide that explains what the acronym means before giving up on words altogether?
When I was in the Military (know for having an acronym for almost everything) it was in our written guidelines to always spell it out first with the acronym followed in parenthesis before you every used the acronym on its own. I still use this technique today.
Example: I was in the United States Air Force (USAF). I learned a lot while in the USAF.
And can we just see the same sort of problems looming for the Core Duo? What’s the next rev of that going to be called? “Core Duo Plus”? “Ultra Core Duo”? “Totally, Like, Awesome Core Duo”?
In editing, we use the same rule that Erik Lane does – spell out on first mention. However, there are some exceptions. Protocols, for example – FTP, HTTP. I have argued when I myself was being edited that for some acronyms, spelling it out doesn’t add any substantive value for the user who doesn’t already know the acronyn. I think FTP fits into that category – if you don’t know what FTP is, spelling it out is very unlikely, in my opinion (IMO), to help you.
For what it’s worth (FWIW), we don’t spell out HTML or XML any more. You have to know your audience, too.
In HTML don’t rely on the abbr and acronym tags alone - keyboard users won’t have access to the attribute value, so always expand the acronym/abbreviation in the text, at least on first use.