Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This is another fundamental of written communications that we seem to have forgotten—the humble abbreviation.

Let’s abbreviate:

1. Jn: John
2. DevSecOps: Development, Security, Operations
3. &: and
4. etc: and other similar things
5. USA: United States of America or United States Army or …

The last item in the list is confusing, but given the context we always know what that means, right? Sorry, we don’t.

I contend that we should not use abbreviations any longer. 98.6% of the abbreviations we use today are not worth the trouble.

An abbreviation is to be used in a case where we don’t have enough space to type the full word(s).

That is a controversial statement. In the days of computers (that’s us, right?) with word processors and “powerpoints” and all this wrap around text automatically and easily scaled font sizes and such (gosh, a lot of things to help us), we have plenty of space.

Why do most of us abbreviate so much? We don’t want to type the words. “USA” is much easier to type than “United States of America.” It is so much work to type those four words instead of those three letters.

Again, all this computer writing stuff makes it easy to type the four words. Just type USA everywhere. Then use the find-and-replace software to … well, you know, find the abbreviation and replace it with the words.

Confusion gone. Extra work gone. A little more clarity restored. A little more clarity is a good think. At least I think so.

I think it is worth the effort. Let’s lessen our use of abbreviations. We have the space for the full words.