Daves Law Of Proximate Acronyms

Not yet succinctly stated, Dave's Law of ProximateAcronyms? is:

: Acronyms that appear in the same sentence should be drawn from the same domain of discourse. Acronyms that appear in the same paragraph should be drawn from closely related domains of discourse. The distance between the domains of discourse should be no greater than the distance between the acronyms.

When we employ acronyms in writing, we trade off brevity against a reader's ability to expand the acronym. The same acronym can take on different meanings in different "domains of discourse". By employing mixed acronyms, flow suffers, and the likelihood of confusion increases. Readers are forced to stop and back up to ensure that they've chosen the correct expansion for an acronym.

Consider this example. Assume the context is "web development."

: ... One approach is to use ASP or JSP or some DIY solution.

In context, ASP probably needs "Active Server Pages", and JSP means "Java Server Pages", but does DIY mean "Do It Yourself", or has some vendor just introduced a new web programming language or environment? ASP and JSP are drawn from a specific domain of discourse (web programming), and DIY is drawn from a different domain. Confusing? Perhaps. It was to me the first time I read it. I had to stop and back up to verify that I hadn't missed or misread something in the previous sentences, and was still left with a tiny seed of doubt that Microsoft had introduced yet another acronym that I hadn't run across yet.

-- DaveSmith

Have any favorite examples of proximate acronym misuse? List 'em here.

We are converting to ASP ASAP (ActiveServerPages or ApplicationServiceProvider?)
JDBC is easier to learn than DBC (http://www.vais.net/~semprebon/Articles/JavaVsEiffel.html)
Some ISPs extend their business to the ASP field, including the hosting of your ASP web applications. (Made up, but surely not impossible to find out there)
We'll FedEx that UPS to you.
UserModeLinux or UnifiedModelingLanguage?

CategoryAcronym