Letter to the Editor -- Acronyms

Dear Editor,

I have just enjoyed reading The Quill, but I would like to make one small but, I believe, important point. The article on Acronyms should really be an article on abbreviations or, even more correctly, initialisms. An acronym is a word made up of the initial letters of other words, for example, radar, scuba, NATO, NAFTA, and so on. An abbreviation is just that, an abbreviation of a word, for example, eng. for English. An example of an initialism would be CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).

I am originally form the UK, having arrived in Canada just over three years ago. I have noticed that, this side of the pond, abbreviations are referred to as acronyms, so maybe it is a regional interpretation. However, as technical communicators, we need to be aware that our work may be read in parts of the world, where confusion could result, so we should strive to ensure there is understanding for all our audiences.

Thank you for an excellent newsletter, to which I hope to contribute in the near future.

best regards,

David Tinsley

Editor's Response:

David, first let me thank you for writing both this letter, and the article that I asked you to write about your experience in the aerospace industry. By writing to me, you showed me that you are reading the articles and that you care enough to write.

Let me also state that although I figured you were right, I decided to look up the definitions in the online Chicago Manual of Style in the FAQs section. The following quotation, which is taken from that site, shows that there was some confusion at one point, even in the Chicago Manual of Style. But, in the end, they did confirm that David is absolutely right.

Q. I had always understood the term acronym to mean an abbreviation that spells a word, such as snafu (per Webster's), but in your manual [the fourteenth edition, 1993) the two terms are used interchangeably. Can you tell me where you get your definition of acronym?

A. Since 1993, we've realized that we needed to be more precise. In the fifteenth edition, therefore, we distinguish between acronyms, initialisms, and contractions, all under the umbrellas of abbreviation, as follows: acronym refers only to terms based on the initial letters of their various elements and read as single words (NATO, AIDS); initialism to terms read as a series of letters (BBC, ATM); and contraction to abbreviations that include the first and last letters of the full word (Mr. , amt.). These distinctions can also be found in the multivolume work Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary, edited by Mary Rose Bonk and published in its twenty-seventh edition in 2000 by Gale Research Incorporated.