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Subject:Re: Q. Acronyms -- Keep The Caps? From:Janice Gelb <janiceg -at- MARVIN -dot- ENG -dot- SUN -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 24 Jul 1998 16:00:49 -0700
Jane Bergen wrote:
>
> The answer is....depends on who you listen to. In my "Que's Computer
> User's Dictionary," they DO use capitalized letters for some acronyms.
> For example, CAD (which would look strange in lower case) and the
> "Official Microsoft HTML Help Authoring Kit" consistently capitalizes
> HTML. So, like most things, just find a style guide and stick with it. I
> use the "Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications" and in
> their acronym list in Appendix A, they also capitalize most of them.
> Maybe the style guides for journalism and general writing are different
> from those for technical documents.
>
It's the capitalization of the words in the *definition* of the acronym
that is being discussed, not the capitalization of the acronym itself.
For example, would it be "CAD (Computer-Aided Design) or "CAD
(computer-aided design)"? This problem generally rears its ugly head
either because (a) programmers want to capitalize the names of
everything in the interface, and then they want to capitalize the
abbreviation or acronym for them; or (b) people think that just because
the letters in the acronym or abbreviation are capitalized, the words
that make it up should be capitalized as well.
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Janice Gelb | The only connection Sun has with this
janice -dot- gelb -at- eng -dot- sun -dot- com | message is the return address. http://www.geocities.com/Area51/8018/index.html
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