Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Using abbreviations without redundancy

略語の使い方について

◎ Abbreviations such as AIDS and ATM are often followed by the words “syndrome” and “machine,” respectively. This is awkward because then the phrases will be read as “acquired immune deficiency syndrome syndrome” and “automated teller machine machine.”

This can be avoided by verifying that the last letter of the abbreviation does not stand for the word that follows it.

Wordy: An LED diode was used as a light source in the detector.
Concise: An LED was used as a light source in the detector.

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