RSS

Why is the Word Abbreviation So Long?

30 Apr

Let’s take a moment to talk about my pet peeve #7230…the over use of acronyms and abbreviations. Seriously…is there anyone else out there who gets tired of writers who take shortcuts by using these?

“Bert discovered he was OCD at the USC after joining the USAF in CA when his mom died of PTSD.” –stupid writer….

It’s annoying, it doesn’t help the reader “get” the story and it’s lazy.

Acronyms and abbreviations are for letter addressing and useless titles given to people who think they are more important than they are. They are not for story writing. It makes sense to use them when writing news stories and magazine articles, but even then, they should be used sparingly. Over use means that a reader who has a short attention span has to keep flipping back in order to keep track of which letters mean what. Even worse, writers who aren’t paying attention can screw them up by getting dyslexic in the middle of their story….now your reader is REALLY confused….does Bert have PTSD or PSTD or DTSP? (or SIYKMS….stop it your killing me syndrome)

No matter how good a writer you are, the over use of these is a bad, bad thing. As a writer who reads…it annoys the crap out of me…enough to make me put a book down and not pick it back up. We don’t speak like that so why would we write that way?

So if you find yourself reading back over your work and it has more random letters throughout than structured words…change it. Isn’t it bad enough that texting has us LMAO, ROFLMAO and ROFLMAOADMS? (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off after dropping my sombrero) Stop it already!

 

© The Writer’s Advice, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

 

About thewritersadvice

Jai is a full-time writer in the Pacific Northwest. An award winning journalist and published author, Jai writes mystery thrillers, ghost writes articles and books as well as feature articles for several national magazines.
1 Comment

Posted by on April 30, 2023 in Healthy Writers, Structure, Writing

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One Response to Why is the Word Abbreviation So Long?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s