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Re: Acronyms

2001-09-24 22:50:02


Hi,
 It's better to add all acronyms on index page.

--balaji

On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Jiwoong Lee wrote:

This is about Internet Draft writing skills. And I wish to listen to some 
wisdom.

I think Readability and comprehensibility are the main goal in writing and 
organizing a technical document.

We have plenty of acronyms in this field. Some are public-domain (wide-spread 
and well-known) and some are newly defined by the author and are introduced 
to the Internet society. (Not ISOC.)

As I demonstrated just now, when I write "ISOC", some people know it very 
much and some do not understand it at all.

In technical writings, we MAY fill most parts of the technical document with 
the bunch of acronyms - so the document sometimes looks like high-level code 
language at a glance. For this we usually define the frequently-used acronyms 
at the first section of the document and now  the document looks logically 
organized and technicians feel comfortable about this.

On the other hand some authors use acronyms extreme-sparingly so that the 
document looks so prosaic, with high-top page numbers.

One good example in my mind is node mobility terminologies. We've got MN, 
CoA, CN, HA, blah..

Some authors never use these acronyms in the main part of their document. 
They say, mobile node, care-of addresses, correspondent node, home agent, eg.,

"A correspondent node sends a packet to the care-of addresses of the mobile 
node via its home agent."

Other authors just say: "

"CN sens a packet to CoA of MN via HA."


Which one do you think is better ? :>
Wise answers plz..


Jiwoong


-- 
--balaji




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