Acronym Abundance

Over the past years, I’ve learned so many acronyms to memorize all sorts of things. Each of these acronyms were helpful in their own way, especially to help remember a list that wasn’t easily memorizable. For example, this week in our English class we’ve been focusing on the author’s purpose, audience, language, and strategies to rhetorically analyze pieces. To help quickly remember these four, we use the acronym PALS.

With so many acronyms accumulated over the years, I’ve forgotten a good majority of these acronyms. Sometimes it feels like I need an acronym to remember acronyms. However, when used frequently or recently, I find acronyms to be very effective to remember information. I also occasionally use them to quickly figure out how many items are in a list, without actually counting through the entire list.

I’ve found that the best acronyms are pronounceable words that are relevant to the topic they are being used for. However, finding an acronym that is related to the topic of the list is quite challenging, so if that isn’t feasible, focus on finding a pronounceable word of moderate length. It is much easier to remember a pronounceable word than a string of letters stuck together.

When using acronyms for anything other than personal use, make sure to let everyone know what the acronym stands for. It can become an awkward situation when no one else is able to follow the conversation when you’re using acronyms that no one else knows.

With all of this in mind, don’t let memorizing long lists scare you any more… unless it's a list of acronyms.