Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Abbreviations have real purposes. Laziness is not one of them.

I see many abbreviations these days. Most are acronyms (TBD, F/U/W, Apr, etc.) that are not expanded. Funny thing, I read in an authoritative book at some point in time that abbreviations were used for:

1. Save space on a page or PowerPoint or such.
2. Faster note taking like short hand writing.

Please note “to save typing when there is plenty of space on the page or PowerPoint or such” is not in the list of uses for abbreviation. If you want to save typing, type some abbreviation and follow that with a find-and-replace with the actual term. Otherwise, I am just being lazy.

We can do better.