Abbreviated communications

I have got some colleagues at work who really have the nasty habit of sending me emails peppered with acronyms! not that I mind acronyms per se, I sometimes even use them myself, but when you need to read an email twice or even thrice in order to decipher all the abbreviations and to understand its full meaning, then imho I think this pushes the envelope.

In our organisation long gone are the days when we fully spelt out our colleagues’ names in full in internal communications. A typical sentence in an internal memo will read something like this: BT has discussed with FA and they have agreed that SB should be PM (Project Manager) assisted by NVI on the FF (the client firm) project. So as long as you’re familiar with everyone in the firm, even the colleagues in the other offices, you’re fine, but if you haven’t met the latest addition to the team yet, you’re bound to struggle.

I mean, I do get it, our lives in general have become so fastpaced that we have hardly the time to write full sentences let alone spell out entire words. Text messages from my son are just a point in case: most of them I need to read at least twice to get the gist of them, except if he wants me to buy something for him, in that case he normally just sends me a link. And quite honestly, don’t we all want to sound important and ‘in the know’ about subjects, which we neither do nor quite possibly want to master, just to impress our partners / kids / friends / colleagues / business contacts (delete as appropriate)?

But is there any time saved really if I write in acronyms and save fractions of seconds but the reader spends much more time than he otherwise would have perusing and trying to understand my message if I hadn’t written in code? At what point will I lose the audience’s patience and attention? Of course there are acronyms which we are all familiar with, such as UN or FBI, even to an extent where we have long forgotten what some abbreviation actually stand for such as in NASA or ASCII. But let’s face it, most are not and many abbreviations are only meaningful to ourselves and maybe a few ‘lucky’ insiders.

Elon Musk has been making headlines for a variety of reasons recently, what many people may not know is that he too is not keen on acronyms. Apparently one of his more famous internal memos is an email he sent to his staff at SpaceX in May 2010, chiding them for making up abbreviations and nominating himself the ultimate arbiter of approved short forms (I recommend reading Musk’s missive).

Admittedly, when texting family and friends I frequently use Lol and other acronyms too, but only those I know – or of which I am reasonably confident to understand the meaning (which is not always a given when texting with people from a different generation such as my son). That way I try my hardest to avoid mishaps such as the IM sent by a mother to her son, informing him that his grandma had just died, ending the message with LOL in the mistaken belief that this meant lots of love.

In any case, I’m not a great fan of texting. It teaches bad syntax and grammar, no wonder our kids let alone grandkids no longer know how to bring a proper sentence to paper (and who uses paper anyway nowadays!). Mobile phone screens and minuscule keyboards are not best suited to write lengthy prose, and I am speaking from experience having tried to write a full blog post on my mobile phone. I had to give up after my wife asked me to stop using foul language.

As I am getting older, I suppose my difficulty of keeping up will only accentuate, but I’ll try my best for FOMO (fear of missing out).