Stop With The Acronyms*
*and unnecessary abbreviations too. Issue #54 - April 29th, 2025
Yesterday I had to stop reading various different documents and emails to go look up the meaning of an acronym or abbreviation online. It may be just me, but that seems to be an increasing occurrence. Almost everyday I come across a jumble of letters in documents, emails, or online that I have to stop and think ‘what does that mean?’
Just as an example. Earlier this week I went for my annual hearing check (I have a moderate hearing loss above certain frequencies), which all went OK. But sitting back at home I was looking at the hearing test results document I’d been given. At the bottom of the form were two lines with a written summary of the level of hearing loss. One line was labelled AD the other AS.
‘What does that mean?’ A quick online search of various audiology websites for the terms gave me this answer.
AS and AD are abbreviations for the left ear and right ear, respectively. They are commonly used in audiology to refer to the ear being tested when conducting hearing tests and interpreting results.
A little more digging and I discovered that AD is derived from the Latin phrase "auris dextra".
How am I as a patient reading my test results meant to know that? If you mean Right Ear then just write Right Ear.
OK there is probably a long history behind why this term came into use - but that doesn’t mean it should still be used when communicating with patients.
But not all the jargon I come across is derived from old latin medical texts - Most of it is very recent and equally unnecessary.
In fact just this month I was witness to someone creating an acronym for a new activity within an organization. They used it in an email without explanation. Everyone in the email chain was then left to figure out what they meant. Within two days a second person had labelled a folder on the organization's knowledge base with the acronym (again without defining it) - now everyone had to figure it out. The five letter acronym was created just to save typing out two words of 12 letters length in total. The amount of confusion and potential for misunderstanding it caused was way out of proportion to the reduction in effort of typing seven extra letters.
Don’t do that.
I’ve worked in jargon and acronym-saturated industries most of my career, but these days I try and make sure to spell out things and use common easily understood terminology as often as I can. Because you never know who will end up reading or listening to your content. And they shouldn't have to go look things up to understand your message.
Alan
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Alan J. Porter
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