Yes, I know I’ve been Missing in Action lately, but instead of explaining the reasons why, this seems like a good time to discuss acronyms.

They can be a ticklish element to use in writing.  There are some acronyms that are pretty universally known, like ASAP or OK.  We even have words some people might not realize are acronyms, like scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus).  And when texting started getting a foothold in how folks communicated, other word groupings became “abbreviated” to make that process faster.

(Note:  I’m old enough to remember when LOL meant Lots of Love.  When it morphed into Laughing Out Loud, I went through a period of confusion.  This can present one of the pitfalls of acronyms.)

But the difference between writing and texting is kind of like the difference between a chicken and a chickadee.  One of them takes a lot more work and investment than the other.

It’s best to save the well-known usages for dialogue if that’s how the characters are going to speak.  If they’re military personnel, who have a tendency to speak in Acronyese, you’re going to have to find ways to explain what those darn letters stand for.

In general you can get away with using an acronym once without an introduction, but you’d better plan on explaining it by the very next paragraph.  It’s more common to introduce the whole word series, like Intellectual Militant Prototype, and soon thereafter render it as IMP so that readers don’t lose track of what that’s supposed to mean.

And that leads me to another little pitfall I’ve noticed:  Even if you purposefully have an acronym spell out another word, there is no 100% guarantee everybody will read it that way.  In my End of an Age series, I wanted the future version of a cell phone to be called something else, and since it would be necessary for Personal Identification and Transaction, it was referred to as a PIT phone.

The word pit was also meant to be metaphorical, but occasionally I would hear somebody call it a P-I-T phone.  The same goes for IMP (imp is also meant to be metaphorical) mentioned above.  Maybe it takes more letters, like in scuba, for some folks to want to say it as a word, but it’s not a detail worth ruffling one’s feathers about….

That should be sufficient for now.  Despite the SNAFU I encountered over the last few weeks that made me go AWOL, I figured the next post should get out PDQ before the FBI put out an APB….  LOL!