Letter From the Editor Blog:

Letter From the Editor Blog

October 2018 Letter From the Editor

Dear scholarly writer,

Though it may seem like a minor aspect of scholarly writing, considering whether you should abbreviate can make a difference between concisely communicating your ideas and confusing a reader with a clutter of letters. Although it is up to an author’s discretion what to abbreviate and how often to abbreviate, the APA manual offers some guidelines for this decision.

The two main guidelines that I look for as an editor for Form and Style are APA 4.22 and APA 4.23. There are few papers that I have seen that have not had an issue with at least one of these guidelines.

To start, APA 4.22 recommends leaving a term spelled out if it appears fewer than four times in the paper. This reduces the number of abbreviations a reader tries to commit to memory, which can be difficult when there are many abbreviations or when the term appears on page 5 and does not appear again until page 38.

APA 4.23 ensures that once an abbreviation has been introduced, only the abbreviation appears in the rest of the paper. I recommend using Ctrl+F or Word’s “find” function to search for an abbreviation after you introduce it to check (a) how often it appears and (b) whether you include the spelled-out term again next to it. Additionally, it is good to search for the spelled-out term to make sure it only appears the first time it is used and in parts of the paper like headings, reference entries, and titles. If you feel that the term needs to be introduced again to avoid confusion, then it is probably better to leave the term written out throughout the paper.

Other guidelines that are helpful to keep in mind include APA 4.24, which states that abbreviations that are listed in Merriam-Webster as words without “abbr.” do not need to be spelled out or introduced (e.g., IQ, REM, HIV). Also note that in the abstract terms are abbreviated if they appear more than once, and abbreviating “Research Question” follows the same guidelines for abbreviations, so sometimes it is better to spell out the term throughout the paper.

Finally, keep in mind how many abbreviations are used in the paper. For example, if you have a list of acronyms in the appendices for a reader to keep track of the abbreviations, you probably have too many. If you have a lot of variables that need abbreviating when presenting statistical results, consider only abbreviating the terms in tables and adding a note at the bottom; it can be confusing for a reader to see “The independent variables of BQ, NA, TPM, and TJ and the dependent variable of HP” repeated throughout the paper.

I hope these guidelines help you in your writing efforts. Though abbreviations are just one aspect of the capstone writing process, following these guidelines can help turn a paper from alphabet soup into clearly communicated research.