Health conditions are varied and complicated. They can cause pain, confusion, dizziness, slack jaw, belly aches… and that’s just their names! Take for example Stein-Leventhal syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic hyperandrogenic anovulation, CHA, and PCOS. As different as they look, these five have something in common: they’re all names for the same thing.

Like birds and trees, abbreviations are often seen in the wild and seldom remarked on. But, like slime molds and toads, abbreviations come in more kinds than most people realize and, while some people find them repellant, others can be quite passionate about them.

Working with medical text? Learn the mistakes to avoid when using medical abbreviations and how to keep abbreviations clear, consistent, and accurate.

With 193 member states, the United Nations could probably have 193 different style guides. Fortunately, the organization has settled on just one United Nations Editorial Manual. The comprehensive online guide includes style suggestions for everything from acronyms to numbering of maps and figures.

If you’re a technical writer, you’re used to handling tricky topics. Maybe you’re teaching system administrators how to set up a new IT platform. Or writing instructions for forklift operators. Or describing how to assemble a gas grill in a way that won’t cause married couples to immediately file for divorce.

Bidding for large EU contracts may seem challenging. However, the process is easier than you think. Moreover, the focus on transparency can work to your advantage. Here’s what you need to understand. EU procurement laws state that contracts over certain values must be advertised through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) to select the most economically advantageous bidder to deliver the contract.

The Microsoft Writing Style Guide provides writing guidance for IT-specific content and communications. Here's what you need to know and how to use it.

Writing a proposal is hard. There’s rarely enough time to give it the attention you want. You don’t always know much about the client, so you feel like you’re writing in the dark. The client may have an unrealistic budget, meaning your cost will knock you out of the running, no matter how well you’ve described your solution. What’s more, they may already have an awardee in mind and are only going through an RFP process as a formality.

Most abbreviations do require a definition. In any case where readers might be confused by TLAs (three letter abbreviations), it's important that they be defined in the text or in a Table of Abbreviations. A research proposal or article with complicated and confusing abbreviations is one that will quickly face rejection. The problem is that authors become so familiar with abbreviations that they forget to define them. To test how prevalent the problem is, we used PerfectIt, the add-in for MS Word that locates undefined abbreviations, to check 3000 randomly selected documents.