?4U. RU DL w/txtg? UR? XLNT! TTMOT, FMOCL. UKIT.

Enough already. For those of you who were able to read the above statement without a web translator, you’re likely under the age of 25. For those of you who glanced at the first line and thought my blog had succumb to technical errors, here’s a translation:

Question for you. Are you down low with texting? You are? Excellent! Then trust me on this, I’m falling out of my chair laughing. You know it’s true.

Believe it or not, I’m not writing this to rip into the communication tools of the text monkeys out there. But I do feel much older as a result of this post. . . No, the point here is to highlight a frequent tendency in the business world to rely too heavily on the mysterious, coded world of acronyms.

Just last week I was handed a 14 page presentation that had *16* words in the whole deck. The rest of the 14 pages of content consisted of acronyms. I had no idea what I was looking at. RUDLWT?

Acronyms play a key role in business lingo, yes. But here are a few rules to keep in mind:

  1. Words come first. Unless you meet colleagues in the hallway and ask them if they “put the DBJ on the KC before BLN,” don’t write like that – in presentations, emails, memos, anything. There are very few acronyms that can be used interchangeably as words. For all others, spell out the entire word for the first mention followed by the acronym in parentheses. You may then use the acronym for the rest of the document.
  2. Don’t go making things up. Look, there’s enough to keep track of these days without getting new acronyms thrown at you. I once worked with a guy who made a game of seeing how many new acronyms he could introduce into our team lingo. And he was pretty darn successful at it! But, please, keep the unnecessary lingo at a minimum and save the good ones for when you really need them.
  3. Keep it at work. I once turned to my husband and asked if he’d “completed his latest CMAP.” You should have seen the look on his face. And then you should have heard him tell me to “please not consider me one of your clients.” He was right, and I’m thankful for being married to a man with such a good sense of humor. UKWIM?