Grammar Girl here, I'm Minyeon Fuguri.

In this week, I have a quick and dirty tip about how to define abbreviations that you

use over and over in a document.

In a fun game you can play from an internet meme about fiction.

And to finish off our little poetry kick from the last couple of weeks, I have a tidbit

about a word that comes from an old nonsense poem, The Owl in the Pussycat, and the winner

of the National Grammar Day High-Coo Contest.

Let's get started with abbreviations.

A listener named Paul wrote, The Guide that I was Todd was to always proceed the first

use of an acronym to be placed inside parentheses by the full term.

This makes logical sense, however, if one has done this, is it then a rule that all further

mentions of that term should be replaced by the acronym, which seems logical else

why have the acronym?

What Paul was taught is right.

You'd write something like the World Health Organization, and then put WHO in parentheses

afterward, is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

The World Health Organization, WHO, is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

And then every time you refer to the World Health Organization later in the document, you

can simply call it the WHO.

The Chicago Manual of Style has a particularly quantitative entry on the topic to help you

know when to go through the effort of defining an abbreviation so you can use it.

Chicago Section 10.3 says if your readers aren't likely to be familiar with the abbreviation,

...