Inspired by this thread, which is popping up a lot as we get closer the April 8th:
But I’ve seen the same thing in a few other posts lately.
You’re doing TLA (Three Letter Acronyms) Wrong!
If you think you need to define a Three Letter Acronym (TLA), you put the definition first, not last! The more obscure the TLA is, the more important this is. Otherwise you make the reader stop to think, “WTF is a “QWR”?”, when they could otherwise just read “Quarterly Weather Report”, or whatever.
Thank you for your Prompt Attention to This (PAtT).
Back in the day, when it was thought by many that the US would be converting to the metric system ANY DAY NOW, some radio stations in my area began giving temperatures in degrees Celsius in addition to in degrees Fahrenheit. They’d say it would be 68 degrees, 20 degrees Celsius. It didn’t really take and they dropped it after a while.
And I believe that one reason it didn’t really take is that they should’ve put the degrees Celsius first. I think most people stopped listening once they knew what the temperature F was. If they’d given 20 degrees Celsius first, people would’ve heard it on the way to finding the Fahrenheit temperature. Maybe they’d have started picking up how the Celsius scale works.
Well, maybe not! But I think it would have been worth a try.
Same reasoning for acronyms. If you lead with what it stands for, the reader ignores the acronym–it’s not necessary for understanding–and then is confused when it’s used again, this time without the explanation. So I prefer “TSE, total solar eclipse” to “total solar eclipse (TSE).” YMOV (your mileage obviously varies)
The difference is, there’s no obvious conversion from C to F unless you’re the sort of person who can not only do math in their head, but also know what math to do. So yeah, they’d read the F measure they’re used to, and ignore the C. Putting the C first makes them subsequently look at the F number to get useful information, and then maybe they make the connection.
But with Obscure TLA Usages (OTUs), just reading the terms almost automatically gives you a real time translation (RTT). Even if you were to ignore the acronym, some useful data would still seep into your brain.
But I work in patents, where (in Canada, at least) you’re required to define your TLAs upon first usage, so I at least have the law on my side (HTLOMS) (in Canada).
You do raise a good point in that TLA could also be Two Letter Acronyms, or Twelve Letter Acronyms, or Twenty Letter Acronyms, or I suppose Thousand Letter Acronyms for that matter…
Us amateur radio operators have a lot of jargon and abbreviations but one type that really does get use in a lot of aspects of the hobby are Q codes. Three letters, beginning with Q, each with a little meaning. Not acronym, though.
Right, which is why you don’t convert. The goal isn’t to go “20 C, that’s 68 F”; the goal is to go “20 C, that’s a nice temperature, though I’d probably prefer the sunny side of the street”, instead of “68 F, that’s a nice temperature”.
Agree the C/F temperature discussion is a total red herring to this discussion. The goal then was to drive the public to begin using the new system by making the new and initially unfamiliar system primary and including the parenthetical fallback system for the not-yet-converted saved.
The OP, despite the diabolical trap in his title, has it right IMO.
In USAF, the official style guide / writing standard agrees with him, or at least it did 40 years ago. There at that time it was required to write the term out in full in title case followed by the Three Letter Acronym (“TLA”) in parentheses and double-quotes the first time, then never use the long form again in that document. The parens+quotes were your cue to pay attention because there’s a quiz starting immediately, maybe even later in this very sentence about TLA usage.
We have editor types here, so I may be soon corrected, but my style recollection is that the acronym or abbreviation is to follow the usage in the first use and be used alone subsequently. If that is the only use then do not introduce the acronym.
To me the bigger issue is when posters assume the meaning of an acronym is understood when it is not as widely understood by the readers as they think.
