Why and How to Craft an Acronym

Last month, while driving on the M60, I thought I’d been snapped by a speed camera, and I swore like trooper. I was furious. Mainly because if I had been speeding, I hadn’t done so knowingly or willfully, but also because it might mean me having to go on one of those dreary National Speed Awareness Courses - again. 

But when my mind wandered back to one I’d been on, probably about a decade ago, the COAST acronym that the course leader drilled into us came revving back. For those of you who’ve never had to do a speed awareness course, COAST stands for Concentration, Observation, Anticipation, Space and Time. 

Acronyms are great to use when you have to present a lot of disparate information which you want listeners to remember. Once I worked with a client who used the acronym LEGO to promote modular architecture. It led her through her key arguments: Light, Economy, Growth and Organisation. 

So if you’ve got diverse information to communicate, here’s how to form a solid acronym:

• Separate the information into different groups and give each of those groups a one-word header. It’s best if those headers are all nouns or all verbs. 
• Write down the first letters of those headers. If you reorder them, do they give you a word? Probably not so…
• Reach for the thesaurus and find synonyms for your header words. If you swapped Pollution, say, for Impurity perhaps you can now form the acronym WHIFF, which might even be an apronym (an acronym that relates to the topic of the talk) if our overarching topic is water pollution. Either way, vowels are your friend. You need them. 
• Try to find an apronym. They’re more memorable. COAST for speeding awareness is a cracker. But don’t let the pursuit of it drive you bonkers. It can. Give yourself 15 mins and if you haven’t found an apronym or even an acronym in that time then stop and instead…
• Go back to your headers and turn them into a numbered list: Point 1 - Waste, Point 2 - Herbicides, Point 3 - Impurity etc. 

For more tips on making information stick, take a look at this post about structuring an informative speech.