Why you should not use acronyms?

In many cases, they can confuse and alienate unfamiliar audiences, and even well-intentioned writers and speakers may overestimate an audience’s familiarity with abbreviations. Abbreviations shouldn’t be completely avoided, but using them as a default can be problematic.

How do you list acronyms in a document?

Typically, this list will:

1. Appear early in the document, just after the table of contents.
2. List all abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms alphabetically.
3. Define each abbreviation alongside its shortened form.

Is it OK to have too many abbreviations?

There’s no hard line of how many abbreviations is too many, but writing is generally easier to understand when most words are spelled out than when it is overflowing with abbreviations. Only abbreviate when it helps the reader. How do I introduce an abbreviation in the text?

Where do you put the acronyms in a letter?

Something I Remember But Can’t Find an Online Source For – put the acronyms at the front of a given letter section (in order), followed by the real phrases. Here is a contrived example.

Are abbreviations allowed in the reference list?

An exception to abbreviations in the reference list is when works have been published using abbreviations as part of the author, title, or source. Retain these abbreviations because the reader will need them to retrieve the source (you also do not need to define them—just present them as-is). See more about this in our post on cite what you see.

Why are abbreviations always in lower case?

By common consensus, abbreviations of common phrases, such as ‘ie’ for ‘that is’, are also in lower case. In modern written English there are no points (periods or full stops) between the letters (as used to be the case) because these are considered redundant as they do not add to the recognisability of the abbreviations.