Abbreviations and inconsistency: Where is the “V” in ART?

I’m editing a document about HIV/AIDS and, while I can’t stand abbreviations, this example especially bothers me: “antiretrovirals” has the abbreviation “ARV,” but “antiretroviral therapy” is abbreviated “ART.” What happened to the V? To be consistent, shouldn’t it be abbreviated “ARVT?”

Why aren’t abbreviations consistent? Why are there countless rules for the English language, but none for creating abbreviations? People can’t just create punctuation, but abbreviations are made at will.

And why are abbreviations often incorrectly called acronyms. Per The Chicago Manual of Style (rule 15.3, 15th edition):

• It’s only an acronym if just the first letter of each word is used and it’s read as a single word, as in PEPFAR (which stands for the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief).
• If an extra letter is thrown in, as with ART and ARV, it’s an abbreviation.
• A term is an initialism if it’s read as a series of letters, such as GRE and ATM

Books writers and editors need

Freelance writing and editing has low start-up costs. Assuming you have a home and phone, all you need is a computer and these books:

• The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law—even if you’re not writing or editing for the media, many public relations documents use this style
• The Chicago Manual of Style-–the industry Bible
• The Economist Style Guide—less of a necessity than the other books (no client has ever asked me to write in The Economist’s style, but a good resource nevertheless)
• The United States Government Printing Office Style Manual—a must if you edit for the government or government contractors
• Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications—the main style guide for many computer manuals
• The Elements of Style—less of a guide than the others, writers and editors should read this book annually to correct bad habits and reinforce good ones

But who edits copy editors?

I’ve recently encountered a few good blogs by professional newspaper copyeditors that have useful posts about style, punctuation, and word choice (even if they don’t use serial commas):

• A Capital Idea—A copy-editing blog covering grammar and newspapers like they’re going out of style
• Blogslot—The blog accompaniment to The Slot: A Spot for Copy Editors
• You Don’t Say: Language and Usage—A blog by John McIntyre, The Baltimore Sun‘s assistant managing editor for the copy desk

Copyeditors (at least these three) have interesting perspectives about language and current events (such as word choice and campaign slogans). Also, it’s interesting getting the perspective of editors whose work is directed predominantly by The Associated Press Stylebook, as opposed to The Chicago Manual of Style that I use most of the time.

A review of Microsoft’s foray into the style-manual market

A job I was recently working on used the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications as its style manual.

Now, as a Mac user I try to avoid Microsoft products, so you can imagine my displeasure when I realized

• Microsoft published a style manual
• I had to abide by it

I found it lacking and wrong. A good style guide doesn’t require an editor to look elsewhere, but with the third edition just 398 pages, the Microsoft Manual of Style had me going to other resources numerous times (The Chicago Manual of Style‘s 15th edition, for example is 956 pages).

The goal of the book seems for Microsoft to justify all of the grammatical mistakes Word tries to push on users, such as its treatment of lists (p. 48):

• always introducing them with a complete sentence or fragment followed by a colon
• always starting each item with a capital letter
• ending every entry with a period if  they all complete the introductory sentence or fragment

The Microsoft Manual of Style, however, does get a lot of rave reviews on Amazon.com, so maybe it does serve a purpose. It’s universally agreed, however, that the included CD-ROM is useless (it wouldn’t work at all on my PowerBook).