abbreviations for words used mostly in the chat setting.

Abbreviations for words used mostly in the chat setting. full#
Abbreviations for words used mostly in the chat setting. professional#

The same type of logic applies to abbreviations and jargon: Though they lack the informal and perhaps even stigmatized status of slang, professional abbreviations and jargon can be used, intentionally or not, to announce one’s ingroup bona fides.

In Slang: The People’s Poetry, the historian Michael Adams treats the concept of slang as a system of language used by subcultures to build social identity and contrast themselves with the larger culture by using unique language.

They increase the perceived importance of ideas, and at the same time they also help keep other ideas from entering the inner circle.” So although abbreviations can block outsiders from understanding a group’s communications, they likely provide a sense of cohesiveness to members of an ingroup. In his book The Upside of Irrationality, Duke University psychological scientist Dan Ariely mentions, almost in passing, that acronyms “confer a kind of secret insider knowledge they give people a way to talk about an idea in shorthand. 1 Consider this following sentence, which is typical of something that we (social psychologists) might say to a colleague: “Did you read the new PSPB article comparing the accuracy of IATs with the AMP procedure? It is a nice follow up to the JPSP article that came out before SPSP.” This sentence is surely easier to produce than a counterpart that spells out the meaning behind each letter, and it’s most likely familiar to social psychologists, but not everyone is a social psychologist. It’s true that abbreviations occupy less space on a page and can be pronounced with fewer In our view, there are three broad reasons why people use acronyms: Given their ubiquity both within and beyond academic writing, it is reasonable to assume that abbreviations serve a function. Here we will use the umbrella term abbreviation to refer to both acronyms and initialisms. The technical definition of an acronym only encompasses abbreviations that are pronounced as words, such as POTUS, FEMA, or NAFTA. However, words like these actually are termed initialisms.

Abbreviations for words used mostly in the chat setting. full#

The term acronym is often misused to refer to any arrangement of letters that stand in for full words, such as PTSD, DV, or GPS. Mindful writers will notice that most abbreviations are unnecessary and will choose to replace them with the meaningful words that underlie them.

In many cases, they can confuse and alienate unfamiliar audiences, and even well-intentioned writers and speakers may overestimate an audience’s familiarity with abbreviations.Ībbreviations shouldn’t be completely avoided, but using them as a default can be problematic. We open our inboxes to find emails with the subject lines “Visit with CTSI/CRC and CHEP,” “DARPA - Next Generation Social Science (NGS2) program - Proposer’s day,” and, mysteriously, “HIPPA: BOYD.” We suspect that this experience is all too familiar to academic psychologists and to members of any group that relies heavily on abbreviations and jargon in its communication.Ībbreviations are all too common in scientific communication and are mostly unnecessary this is reason enough for conscientious writers to avoid them.