Step up to the plate and answer this grammar question for me please.
Should one use an “a” or an “an” when writing an abbreviation or acronym that begins with a letter that starts with a vowel sound when pronounced.
For example:
I am posting on an SD message board.
OR
I am posting on a SD message board.
I can never decide which is correct. Using “a” looks appropriate but using “an” sounds appropriate to me. I can’t help hearing the second sentence as: “I am posting on a Ess Dee message board.” I suppose if one were to read the second phrase as “I am posting on a Straight Dope message board.” than it would be correct. However, I imagine most people read “SD” as “Ess Dee.”
It should be an SD message board. The a/an distinction is based on consonant versus vowel sounds, not the actual letter. This is why you use “an” in front of “hour” but not “house.”
You hit it on the head, tevya. It all depends on how you pronounce it. Or how you think most of the readers are going to pronounce it. If the acronym is SD but 95% of the people who see it would say it as “Straight Dope”, you would write it as “a SD message board.” If most of the people would pronounce it as “ess dee”, you’d write, “an SD message board.”
I recently encountered this problem in one of the books we were editing at my place of work. The author kept referring to “a SQL server.” The lead copyeditor kept changing this to “an SQL server”, on the grounds that it was pronounced “ess cue ell”. The author emailed back to say that he, and most of the people he expected to read the book, actually pronounced it “sequel.” So we changed every “an” back to “a”.
Actually, to say “I am posting on a/an SD message board” implies that there are multiple boards. It would probably be better to say “I am posting on the SD message board.” or I am posting on a message board called SD.
