Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
TLAs decrease the SNR of technical communication. (TLA abbreviates “three letter acronym” and SNR stands for “signal-to-noise ratio”.)
When you examine a technical report or presention about an unfamiliar subject, often the abundant use of acronyms causes a great deal of trouble in understanding. To the uninformed reader, the acronyms increase the “noise” level of the “signal” that the author is trying to convey.
Only when one is familiar with a particular field’s abbreviation jargon do they have the ability to fully understand the information. So, TLAs are kind of “encoded” information. If you don’t know the code, the information is just noise.
(A fun* analogy is in spread spectrum communication: information is encoded and transmitted over such a wide spectrum that is looks like nothing but noise except to the reciever who has to code that pulls the signal out of the noise.)
*fun for dorky engineers at least
That’s the thought of the day. If you love it, eat a burrito.
