Re: Q. Acronyms -- Keep The Caps?

[Janice Gelb <janiceg -at- MARVIN -dot- ENG -dot- SUN -dot- COM>]

Rowena Hart wrote:
>
> I need some expert opinions about how to define
> acronyms in the body of a document.
>
> I use the old journalism rule and don't capitalize the
> first letter of each word in the acronym.  For example:
>
>     COM (component object model)
>     HTML (hyper text mark-up language)
>
> The programmers I work with prefer to keep the
> first-letter capitalized in acronym definitions, ie:
>
>     COM (Component Object Model)
>
>
> I don't want to start a style war on the list, so if you
> have a strong opinion either way, send me a reply
> directly at rhart -at- intrinsyc -dot- com
>

All programmers seem to want to do this. They're wrong.  Unless the
words in the acronym or abbreviation are proper nouns (such as a
trademarked product name), they should be lower case. One big clue
(sometimes this manages to convince them) is if they're not
capitalizing the whole phrase in the document, they shouldn't be
capitalizing it in the acronym. (Of course, a lot of times they want to
capitalize most nouns in the document, too...) This may be one of those
cases where you have to duke it out on the level of "Just like you're
the programmer and your specialty is writing code, I'm the writer and
my specialty is how to write things."

Good luck!

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