Q. I’m writing a research article, and the text frequently mentions the biological process that is the subject of the article. I’m also worried about exceeding the length limit for the journal I have in mind to send the article. Can I create a nice compact acronym for this biological process?
A. No!
Q. Are you sure? It would really save me a lot of space.
A. Sorry, the answer is still no!
Q. For an FAQ you sure are down on acronyms.
A. That’s right, I am. And thank you for pointing out the critical issue here: you knew what “FAQ” stands for long before you arrived here. It’s not a barrier to reader comprehension; people will simply absorb it and move on to the Qs and As.
In contrast, if you create an acronym from whole cloth for use in your paper, readers won’t be familiar with it. They’ll have to do the extra cognitive work of remembering what the acronym means. If the acronym stands for the process that’s the subject of the paper, that means you’ve made it harder for readers to remember what the paper is about. How does that help you communicate what you discovered about that process?
Moreover, if you have to invent an acronym for the process, that means the acronym is not widely familiar even to other people who study the process. So it’s going to be a barrier to easy reading for the people who are most interested in your paper, and it may even irritate them to see their favorite process reduced to a blob of capital letters. Unless you personally discovered the process, and thereby get naming rights, don’t invent an acronym for it.
Q. Wait a minute. Every acronym has to have been introduced into the world at some point. Wouldn’t your advice would throttle the introduction of any new acronym?
A. Yes, precisely.
Q. What do you have against introducing new acronyms?
A. Mostly that it degrades the clarity of your writing. But also, we have enough acronyms. To the point that we’re starting to duplicate their functions, even. In evolutionary genetics we have both isolation by distance and identity by descent, sometimes in the same paper! God help the biologist who sets out to study the contributions of spatial genetic differentiation and pedigree structure to the incidence of inflammatory bowel disease.
Q. Doesn’t that just imply we need new acronyms for two out of three of those IBDs, rather than abandoning all of them?
A. No! Absolutely not. Just use actual words, what is so hard about that?
Q. But acronyms are useful! They help us write more efficiently.
A. Do they?
Q. Sure — more words communicated in less space is more efficient.
A. …
Q. Isn’t it?
A. It’s really not. The operative word there is “communicated.” Every word you have to introduce and explain to a reader makes your writing more challenging to follow. Creating acronyms is like introducing new vocabulary words, except they’re not even words! They’re just collections of letters that make sense to someone already familiar with the concept abbreviated into the acronym. Good writing should be accessible to the largest possible audience, which is to say, more people than those who come to the piece of writing already familiar with a central concept.
Q. What if I put together a terms list in a box on the first page for readers to consult? Then they can just flip to that if they forget what the acronyms mean.
A. Do you really want your reader to have to flip back to your special box of acronym-decoding when they could be contemplating the brilliance of your research results? No, you do not.
Q. Hey, I made it all the way through Infinite Jest that way, flipping back and forth through hundreds of pages of main text to get the funny backstory and extra jokes in the endnotes. Is it too much to expect people reading a 10-page paper to do the same?
A. You are certainly free to approach writing research articles as though you’re David Foster Wallace if that’s what makes you happy! But — and I say this as a person who has read Infinite Jest multiple times and even attempted to get through The Pale King — you do so very much at your own risk.
Q. Yeah, that’s fair.
A. I feel like we both knew the answer to that one.
Q. Fine, we did. But what if my new acronym is a funny little pun? Wouldn’t that make it more memorable, as well as pleasant to read?
A. Well, okay, maybe, if you’re clever about it. (This is really the exception to every rule about writing, isn’t it?) But are you totally confident you’ll come up with something snappy and clever and memorable, and not something that makes it sound like British comedian and Drag Race UK judge Alan Carr is interrupting the sleep/wake cycles of wildlife all over the world?
Q. That seems like a very specific kind of risk that I can safely expect to avoid.
A. Sure, but it does demonstrate that it’s hard to guess how an invented acronym will land with your audience. Some of us have partners with paid subscriptions to RuPaul’s streaming service!
Q. Is there any context in which you’d let me invent an acronym?
A. There really isn’t. It’s almost always going to make your writing clearer and easier to read if you simply write out real words. That’s even the case if it means you have to trim and compress in other ways to meet the length limits of a journal or a grant-funding agency. I guess maybe neo-acronyms are okay in the case of naming a software package, when you want clever, memorable branding? Even then, you can often just use a real word to similar effect.
Q. Well, all this is just one person’s opinion. Nothing requires me to do what you say I should do, does it?
A. That’s right! This is just the POV from one humble, cranky FAQ. I strongly believe that if you want to get your point across, in a scientific paper or any other written work, you’re better off not making your reader learn and keep track of new abbreviations — but YMMV.
