Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 10:38:52 -0400 From: Leonard Zettel <zettel@acm.org> To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Acronyms believed harmful Message-ID: <200407091038.52304.zettel@acm.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
With apologies to Edsger Dijkstra, RIP. I am probably pissing into the wind with this one, but I feel honor-bound to try.... In my (undoubtedly unhumble) opinion the worst style-rot to attack the English language in the last fifty years is the unrestricted proliferation of unnecessary acronyms in the technical literature. Things like DTD are not English, they are jargon! They place an unnecessary burden on the reader. This burden falls most heavily on newbies and (I would imagine) people to whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language - exactly the people who most need the help of clear documentation. At a minimum I plead for the following rule: all uses of acronyms in any document should include the term fully spelled out at the first appearance of said acronym. Given the text completion and search-and- replace capabilities of most text processing systems an even better rule would be to ban them altogether. =A0 =A0-LenZ-
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200407091038.52304.zettel>