This is something I’m generally pretty good about, but I need to make sure I stay focused on it. Particularly in the world of marketing, there are acronyms everywhere that you look. While I use them frequently and know what most of them mean, those that I interact with may or may not. Whatever your world looks like, taking the time to expand acronyms on first use is a wise thing to do.
In some cases, it takes a bit more than just expanding them. If I’m talking about web design and mention CSS, I could expand it the first time by saying “CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)”. For someone that wasn’t familiar with CSS, does “Cascading Style Sheets” really help? Probably not. Really, I should say something like:
“… when you’re using CSS (“Cascading Style Sheets”, which is code that adds fonts, color and other design elements to a page) it is essential to …“
If you’re ever sharing with a group, whether it’s in a lecture, video, blog post, or otherwise, I encourage you to expand every acronym the first time you use it because you never know what it’s in the head of everyone else that’s watching.
