Re: Acronyms

["Balaji H. Kasal" <balaji at it.iitb.ac.in>]

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