Substance and Style
| Jurisdiction | United States,Federal |
| Citation | Vol. 88 No. 4 Pg. 10 |
| Pages | 10 |
| Publication year | 2019 |
Dump the Alphabet Soup
by Joyce Rosenberg
"One of the most irritating types of pedantry in modern writing is the overuse of abbreviations, especially abbreviated names."[1] In your writing, "[a]void initialese. 'Initialese' refers to the overuse of words formed from initials. Initialese can make your sentences look like chemistry formulas. Example: MLPF&S was an ERISA fiduciary of the PSP. Use words instead of initials wherever possible . . . . [Y]our reader should be able to follow a quotation using only the parties' names."[2]
Sound advice.
But here's the opening paragraph of a key argument section in an appellants' brief:
"Although DOE has not disclaimed its obligation to dispose of SNF, it is undisputed that DOE currently has no active waste disposal program. DOE has requested no funding for the waste disposal program in FY 2012, and DOE admittedly has terminated the Yucca Mountain program. The BRC certainly is not a replacement for DOE's Yucca Mountain waste disposal program. The BRC is undertaking none of the waste disposal program activities identified in NWPA § 302(d). Its existence therefore cannot justify continued NWF fee collection."[3]Reads like poetry, doesn't it (RLPDI)? The initialisms [4] in that paragraph make it hard to read and harder to understand. The reader has to work not only to absorb the substance of the paragraph, but to decode party names and other apparently important information.
As a result, judges and other readers don't like initialisms (and other obscure abbreviations). [5]A court might even reject a filing because of them; recently, the Clerk of Court for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit admonished the lawyers in one case that they would need to review their briefs for excessive abbreviations and would likely need to revise and resubmit them.[6]
In the D.C. Circuit, attorneys are required to avoid almost all initialisms.[7] That's probably understandable for a court that routinely hears cases involving the alphabet soup of federal statutes and the agencies that administer them. Tenth Circuit local rules don't disfavor such abbreviations, although "[a]ll briefs containing acronyms or abbreviations not in common use . . . must include a Glossary. . . ." [8]Whether or not the rules specifically forbid them, however, it's fair to say overuse of initialisms (and similar...
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