Years ago, my hydro company introduced time-of-use billing.

The colourful tri-fold brochure they sent my family was all about how electricity would cost more during peak hours, and less during off-peak hours, holidays, and weekends.

Curious, like a reader skipping to the last page of a book to spoil the ending, I flipped that bad boy open to do some skimming. I wanted to know if, after an initial glance, I needed to spend more time reading it.

I ran into a “TOU.” And then another. And then another. They stood out from the other text like a knife in a drawer of spoons, in all their capitalized glory among the regular copy. I was confused – it wasn’t a common initialism and there was nothing on the inside pages to clear up the meaning.

When I read back to the beginning, I learned it simply meant “time of use.”

The word nerd in me took control.

“Why did they have to shorten that?” I blurted out to my parents, who just happened to be in the kitchen with me and certainly weren’t able to provide the answer.

It was a rhetorical question, anyway. But the point I was trying to make? “Time of use” is already short on its own (the abbreviation saves a whopping eight characters), and easier to read and understand when spelled out in full.

They were making me work when they didn’t need to.

Why we like to shorten things

Acronyms and initialisms exist for a very good reason: to keep our work from getting bogged down with long, complicated, and repeated terms and titles. They can be simpler to say, and easier to remember, than a full-length exposition.

You’ll see them a lot in academic, scientific, and technical writing in particular, where the audience already knows the concepts you’re discussing.

So, for example, it’s generally acceptable to shorten phrases like “short-term memory” or “inter-trial interval” to “STM” and “ITI” in a scientific publication serving an audience that’s already familiar with those abbreviations, according to the APA Style guide. In most cases, you’ll see the term defined up-front, in full, to clear up any residual confusion. 

(Even in those publications, there’s debate around whether things have gone too far in the pursuit of shortening things up.)

Outside of scholarly journals, you’ll find abbreviations in common language, both spoken and written, for the same reasons.

Try saying “ante meridiem” or “post meridiem” every time you give someone the time and you’ll see why. Or don’t, because it would be incredibly annoying if we didn’t have “a.m.” and “p.m.” to do the work for us, and I don’t want to see you suffer.

Ditto for common, household abbreviations like IQ, DNA, GIF, CD-ROM. Then there’s the plethora of organizational names, like BMW, IBM, and NASA, and internet lingo that became widely popular for being quick to type and easy on the character count, like LOL, BRB, BTW, IRL, and OMG.

They’re all widely-known and, for the most part, we apply meaning directly to their short form without translating each letter in our heads.

The problem happens when abbreviations don’t meet the standards of “replacing long, complex, and repetitive terminology” and “the audience is probably familiar with it” – both tests which “TOU” failed.

More often, it gets in the way

The Canadian Press Style Guide (my writing bible) says the following on the topic of abbreviations: “Text studded with abbreviations is hard to read and unsightly. Avoid when an option exists.”

Basically: if you feel like you need to define it, then just spell it out to be as clear as possible.

There are a couple of good reasons for this:

We don’t always remember them. Sure, you defined your acronym or initialism on page one, but by the time I get to page three and see it pop up again, will I retain that definition, or will I need to flip back and forth?

We skip them when skimming. When we scan text, we’re looking for a specific word or idea. If that information is hidden behind an acronym or initialism, we skip right over what we’re looking for.

They’re distracting when reading. On the other hand, when we’re reading a sentence and there’s an acronym on the horizon, that all-caps rectangle of letters stands out from everything else around it.

They slow us down. When we encounter acronyms or initialisms we don’t know or don’t use often, we process them micro level, letter-by-letter. But they’re surrounded to content that we process on the macro level, in words, phrases, sentences, and the spaces in between. The result: they grind the flow and speed of reading to a halt.

They might mean something else. The same hydro company has something called a regulated price plan, which they shorten to “RPP.” As an employee at a financial company, I instantly thought, “registered pension plan.” Someone from another industry might recognize that as a “registered professional planner,” “recreational pilot permit,” or “report on plans and priorities.” All borrow the same short form in their circles.

In short: acronyms and initialisms make your audience work in a world where they want things to be as simple as possible.

Is this abbreviation okay?

By no means do I believe we should abolish all acronyms and initialisms, or that they always impede reading. They don’t. Good ones help us get our message across quickly and easily, to the right audience.

But before you start throwing your own TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) all over your content, ask yourself these questions to decide if it’s really necessary:

• Will your audience need to look it up?
• Is it difficult to remember page-to-page?
• Is it replacing a short, simple term?
• Does it appear just a few times in your content?
• Does your content use a lot of other abbreviations?
• Could it mean something else to a significant chunk of your audience?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, consider spelling it out in full instead.

Final thoughts

I have some theories about the proliferation of “TOU” in that hydro brochure. Maybe it’s a widely-used term inside the industry and someone assumed that we’d all know it, too. Maybe a battle was fought – and lost – by an intrepid writer who wanted to spell it out. Maybe they assumed that it was uncomplicated enough, and that as an adult who made it through grade school, I’d be more than capable of connecting the dots.

I’d like to believe that last part is true, but understanding their message did require me to work a little harder. “Don’t make me think” is a popular phrase in usability and product design, and while it may not apply to the substance of your content (surely you want to be thought-provoking every now and then), it does apply to how easy your messages are to read.

Either way, the whole experience apparently stuck with me… and not in a good way.