Opened 20 years ago
Closed 20 years ago
#924 closed defect (invalid)
don't expand acronyms so much
| Reported by: | Owned by: | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | lowest | Milestone: | |
| Component: | Book | Version: | TESTING |
| Severity: | normal | Keywords: | |
| Cc: |
Description
Writing things like "Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE)" is goofy for several reasons:
1) If the reader isn't already familiar with the term "IDE", they should have stopped reading several chapters back 2) The standard CMS (Chicago Manual of Style) rule about expanding acronyms assumes that the expansion of the acronym carries more information than the acronym itself. That is not the case here, where the acronym is essentially a word in and of itself, no one *ever* uses the expansion, and all of the related terms (SCSI, SATA, etc) are built from completely orthogonal sets of words. 3) Knowing what IDE stands for is useless in the context of LFS anyway. It will not make users more linux-guru-ish (I bet Linus doesn't know what IDE stands for), it will not let them ask for help more coherently, etc.
I'm marking this invalid for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I was always taught to expand acronyms immediately prior to their first use. Secondly, acronyms can have several meanings dependent on context. Consider your IDE example. Even within the computing field this may mean "Integrated Drive Electronics" or it may mean "Integrated Development Environment". By expanding it we make it absolutely clear what the book means when it refers to something by that acronym.
Cheers,
Matt.