Yeah, they totally need to spell that one out for the reader.
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It's not a term I know, if that counts for anything.
Or is it a case of the doc author thinking they're being clever but not spelling out acronyms?
Don't they always?
THIS IS WHY THEY NEED TO HIRE ME. Plus I just won buzzword bingo after reading two sentences in this document.
In Journalism school, they taught us to always spell out the first usage of any acronym. I wish that were the case for things that are to be read by people with a wide variety of experience.
In Journalism school, they taught us to always spell out the first usage of any acronym.
We always do that. In large part it's because we have un-American readers, and acronyms/abbreviations aren't the same in other languages (e.g., "AIDS" is "SIDA" in Spanish, and "HIV" is "VIH").
Also many acronyms are acronyms for more than one term. In my recent book the same acronym stood for a technical terms I was using and a union I was writing about. Since neither term was used much, I skipped acronyms for both. Otherwise I would have use the acronyym for the term I used most.
In Journalism school, they taught us to always spell out the first usage of any acronym.
That's what is SUPPOSED to be done in the tech industry. But I have found that many people creating documentation like to throw around acronyms and assume that everyone knows what they stand for. Like a team I worked with that was genuinely surprised to find out that most users didn't automatically parse "Commerce Server Staging" when they read "CSS".
Yeah that's cascading styles sheets to me!!
Even within the same field, acronyms can be inconsistent. I learned MOS in film school to mean "motor only shot" (i.e., no sound). But on a news shot sheet MOS means Man On Street (as in interview). Took me ages to figure that out.
That's what is SUPPOSED to be done in the tech industry
I think some of the acronyms have reached the point where spelling them out doesn't help anyone. I mean, if I wrote out HyperText Markup Language or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, people would be all "What is she talking about?" where HTML or https would send them to their reflexive comfortable place.