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I used to wonder this about MD and a.m./p.m. It's mostly a matter of whether your reader will understand what you're talking about. I'd got with SWAT, probably. Ph.D. will always keept the dots for me, though. I am less certain on the a.m./p.m. I used to think P.M. was capitalized and a.m. not, now I make them both small. Does spell check have any help for you?
Posts: 366 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Currently I have it as SWAT and Word doesn't flag it--but I've learned very early on that means a can of beans.
Posts: 1275 | Registered: Mar 2004
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My uncle is captain of a S.W.A.T.(Special Weapons And Tactics) team. If your narrarating use S.W.A.T., if it's in in a quote, use "SWAT".
LOL - ChrisOwens, your MS Word doesn't flag it because SWAT--as in swat a bug--is a word, too. Not saying it WOULD flag it otherwise, but it wouldn't because of that.
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If an acronym is pronounced as a single word, write it out without periods, whatever the pronounciation may be. But if it's pronounced as if spelled out, use periods---unless the form is too well known the other way. Just a habit I picked up from reading a book about NASA and the Apollo Project---not that the people of NASA were ever consistent, but the book was.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:If an acronym is pronounced as a single word, write it out without periods, whatever the pronounciation may be. But if it's pronounced as if spelled out, use periods---unless the form is too well known the other way.
That is an eminently reasonable rule of thumb, which I'll be using from now on. Thanks.
Posts: 1517 | Registered: Jul 2003
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Happy to be of help. I'll credit the book: Apollo: The Race to the Moon, Charles Murray & Catherine Bly Cox, 1989---the rule is under "Apollo Abbreviations" on page 11 of the trade paperback.
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Oh, great, now I started rereading the book---and I've got piles of fresh reading material just crying out for me to read them. There are just not enough hours in the day.
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The Futurama team added another day to the week, Blernsday, so they could get more work done. You could use that day to get your reading out of the way.
Posts: 78 | Registered: Jun 2003
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The designers I work with (and the design books I read) say that this is mostly an issue of typographic convention as opposed to copy editing. (SWAT vs. S.W.A.T., that is, not Blernsday.) SWAT is fine. It can get trickier with other acronyms as they make their way into the language: S.C.U.B.A. vs. SCUBA vs. scuba (the former is not really acceptable anywhere anymore, the latter is best, the middle is pedantic), LASER vs. laser (clearly only the latter is used).
Lots of acronyms get used with capital letters, but no periods in IT (information technology), whether or not you can pronounce the result: technologies like ODBC, JDBC, EAI, MSMQ, MQ, TCP/IP, and applications like SAP, JDEdwards (though I occasionally see that as "J.D.Edwards" or "J.D. Edwards"), to name a few.
One thing you might try: www.googlefight.com. It's far from scientific, but it enables you to see what version might be more popular, e.g., "JDEdwards" is 277 times more popular than "J.D.Edwards".
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Somehow it eluded me that "scuba" is an acronym. What is it an acronym for?
Sometimes it can get trickier still. Fans of NASCAR can get very angry when it's written out as "Nascar"---something the mainstream media does so often that I think they don't realize it's an acronym. (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing---as originally coined by Red Vogt at the organizational meeting in 1947 in Daytona Beach.)
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And here I thought it was a conflation of "nasty cars". Seriously, though, having car and auto next to each other is kind of... pick your term. It makes it sound like there is something automated about the actual racing. And maybe that was the point, they were really excited about having a digital score board.
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