Acronyms believed harmful

[Leonard Zettel]

With apologies to Edsger Dijkstra, RIP.

I am probably pissing into the wind with
this one, but I feel honor-bound to try....

In my (undoubtedly unhumble) opinion
the worst style-rot to attack the English
language in the last fifty years is the
unrestricted proliferation of unnecessary
acronyms in the technical literature.

Things like DTD are not English, they
are jargon! They place an unnecessary
burden on the reader. This burden
falls most heavily on newbies and
(I would imagine) people to whom
English is a second (or third or fourth)
language - exactly the people who
most need the help of clear documentation.

At a minimum I plead for the following rule:
all uses of acronyms in any document
should include the term fully spelled out
at the first appearance of said acronym.

Given the text completion and search-and-
replace capabilities of most text processing
systems an even better rule would be to ban
them altogether.
   -LenZ-