A generous share of academic writing is an inevitable part of every student’s life. Clearly you will get to all the nuances as you move on through your college years, but in the beginning, all the formatting mat be that one thing that always gets in the way. Surely, there are many things to learn, as well as memorize, and abbreviations are an essential component of all that formatting chaos. That is why today, we are going to share with you a bunch of tips that will help you get used to the notion of abbreviation in no time.
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Use professional writing help
First things first, as long as you are not fully satisfied with the outcome of your papers, you can ask for professional help. There are many writing services that reach out a helping hand when a student is in need of some formatting as well as composing help. We happen to have one particular professional essay writing service in mind, and AdvancedWriters is the name. The level of services their professionals provide is always of the highest quality, so you shouldn’t worry about the excellent result.
Acronyms and Initialisms
While you are having your first essays written as we discuss the matter, it will be best if you spend the spare time learning something useful about that tricky academic writing thing. We are going to start with the acronyms and initialisms. As fancy as those words sound so common, they are in your everyday life. The only thing is that you may not know they are called that way.
Acronyms and initialisms are usually the first letters of every word that the phrase contains. For instance, all of you have heard about the BBC. However, the BBC is not just the name of the media resource we are used to. There is a hidden explanation to this abbreviation too. BBC stands for British Broadcasting Corporation. As you can see the abbreviation is made out of the first letters in the phase and that is what they call acronyms and initialisms.
This type of abbreviation is used in academic writing in order to keep the text anything but spammed with the same phrase. Important things that before you start using acronyms and initialisms in your essays, you need to define what they stand for in the first place and then introduce the abbreviation into the text.
Latin Abbreviations
Just like acronyms, Latin abbreviations are widely used in academic writing, and surely you have come across the most popular of them already. For example, ‘etc.’ which is the short form of the phrase et cetera. Unlike in the case of acronyms, it is hard to define Latin abbreviations until you memorize them all.
It should be pointed you that every subject study has its own peculiar Latin abbreviations, especially law. It may take you a while to remember those phrases, but in the long run, your efforts will pay off, you can trust us on that!
Titles, Measurements, and Dates
Another category of popular abbreviations contains titles, measurements as well as dates. We are going to have a closer look at each point separately.
Titles
Let’s talk about such a common title as a Doctor. If there is a name after used after the title, you do not need to write the full title. It is enough to shorten it. For instance, Dr. Thompson.
Measurement
To begin with, we should point out that in the formal writing units of measurements are mostly used in full. However, if we are talking about scientific or technical works here, they are usually shortened. Let’s take “three meters” for example. In the latter types of writing, you would rather come across “3m” instead of the full form.
Dates
Once again, in formal writing, it is hard to spot a shortened date, however, in all the other types, that is a common abbreviation. For example, if we write Monday, February 10th, it can be shortened to Mon., Feb. 10.
Punctuating Abbreviations
It is not enough to know how to shorten a phrase correctly. You should also be aware of how to punctuate it too. To tell the truth, American and UK punctuation varies when it comes to abbreviation, so you should be careful here too.
UK
In the United Kingdom, they add a period to the abbreviation that consists of the first part of the word, let’s say November would be shortened to Nov. however, at the same time the titles that we discussed above, usually do not have a full stop to them because they mostly consist of the first as well as the last letter of the word – Dr or Mr do not need a period to them.
US
The title rule that the British use does not apply to American formatting since almost all the abbreviations come with a full stop to them, except for metric measurement. The corresponding Dr and Mr will be used as Dr. and Mr. accordingly when US formatting is applied.
We have pointed out the main mistakes related to the abbreviations in academic writing so that you do not make these simple mistakes in your essays never again!
