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