FYI: It’s Not a Good Idea to Use Abbreviations
The economic damage inflicted by abbreviations
Abbreviations are everywhere. There are pretty common ones that everyone knows like etc., e.g., i.e. and so forth but there are also industry-/domain-/ organization-specific abbreviations — and I think that’s a bad thing!
Let me start explaining, by relating a piece of personal experience:
I did my first internship with one of the famous German car manufacturers. I was young, inexperienced and you might even say a little bit naive. I had gathered quite a bit of theoretical knowledge at school and university, but — even though I would surely have contested this assessment back then — I was a bit green when it comes to “real life”.
Back then, the car manufacturer’s company culture was not as admirable as the cars it produced: Management ruled through a regime of pressure, fear and allocation of guilt. So one day, I got the assignment to “call Mr. XY and shout at him”. I was neither given an explanation as to why Mr. XY deserved to be shouted at nor did I feel that — as an intern — I had the authority to do so. I procrastinated as long as I could but finally gave Mr. XY a call and did my best at politely shouting at the man.
Immensely relieved to have gotten this burden off my shoulders without
Mr. XY appearing to discover that I was “only” an intern and had no idea what he had actually done wrong, I set out to check my emails. Just minutes after the phone call, I received an email from Mr. XY which at first glance only consisted of three letters: FYI.
Now I know that FYI is a pretty commonly used abbreviation for “for your information”, usually indicating a forwarded email that should be acknowledged but doesn’t require any immediate action from the recipient. But remember, back then I was new to the business world and I had just shouted at that email’s sender, believing he had every right to be angry with me. So when I tried to make sense of those three letters, my guilty conscience and my ingenious brain deciphered: “Fuck you, idiot!”
I was outraged! I knew, I had just unduly shouted at the man — but at least I had done so in a respectful way and without resorting to this kind of language. I sat there, grinding my teeth, coming up with angry fantasies of how to get back at that guy and was just about to confront my superior, when I discovered the forwarded original email below Mr. XY’s email signature. I read it and was rather puzzled because it just didn’t fit with the assumed insult. Slowly, I calmed down enough to put the pieces together and finally understood that FYI must be an abbreviation for “for your information”.
You might say: “But FYI is a common abbreviation and everyone knows what it means!”, but my story proves that not everyone knows it and that serious misunderstandings can arise from the use of abbreviations . Everyone starts somewhere, even with the more common ones…
The rationale for employing abbreviations appears to be straight forward on first sight: Abbreviations are short forms of words or phrases used in their stead and thus save time, especially when having to write them down. And time is money, right?
Well, this only becomes a business case, if the damage inflicted by them, isn’t larger than their benefit. So let’s have a look at the negative potential of abbreviations:
- Someone who does not know the abbreviation has to invest time and effort to discover its meaning.
They may look it up on the internet (if the abbreviation is sufficiently common and publicly known), ask a colleague (potentially disrupting that colleague’s thought process at his respective task), look it up on a company intranet/glossary (which needs to be maintained) or infer it from the context (risking misinterpretation as demonstrated in the story above). In the worst case, they may not find out, what the abbreviation stands for. - Someone who thinks to know an abbreviation’s meaning but actually knows another abbreviation operates under false assumptions.
There is no central register that governs abbreviations across industries, domains, organizations, business units, communities and so on. Combine this with the fact, that there is only a limited number of possible abbreviations with up to three letters from A-Z, some of which are much more probable due to our languages, and you’ll see that collisions (different words or phrases being mapped to the same abbreviation) cannot be avoided. Collision candidates are also known as “error prone abbreviations” (or god forbid: EPAs).
There are often even multiple uses of the same abbreviations within a single enterprise. The result is even worse than in the first case, as individuals assuming to know what an abbreviation stands for have more difficulties at grasping the context in which the abbreviation is used in the best case, while possibly making wrong decisions based upon a faulty understanding in the worst case (for example, according to this paper, abbreviations are the cause of nearly 5% of medication errors). - Someone who actually knows an abbreviation still has to “decode” it while reading or listening.
Even when we know what an abbreviation stands for, we still usually “decode” it in our brains while reading a text or listening to others. Depending on how well we know the abbreviation, this can still slow us down significantly.
The first two implications are likely to occur when an individual enters a new industry/domain/organization and so on while the third may decrease in impact over time when staying within the same industry/domain/ organization.
You might say that abbreviations are no different than industry-/domain-/ organization-specific language. But the difference is, that in contrast to the specific language, the abbreviations are just not necessary and could easily be avoided, so this is my plea: Stop using them — A.S.A.P.! ;)
