This is a followup to No Acronym Thursday.

Today, struggling through my first Thursday sans acronyms, I’ve been thinking about communication. What does communication even mean? For our purposes, we’ll call communication a means of transmitting an idea from one party to another via a message.

1. Alice has an idea
2. Alice encodes her idea into a message. Spoken words, email, handwritten notes, skywriting, songs, shrugs, poems, and tweets are examples of forms that messages can take.
3. Alice transmits her message to Bob.
4. Bob receives Alice’s message.
5. Bob decodes Alice’s message.
6. Bob now shares Alice’s idea.

At their best, acronyms increase the efficiency of communication. They play a role in steps 2 and 5, encoding and decoding. Acronyms can help shorten messages so they may be transmitted more efficiently. Unfortunately they only work if Alice and Bob have sufficient common background and context.

If you truly believe that improved communication is an important ingredient in promoting harmony, understanding, peace, education, intelligence and love, which I do, give No-Acronym Thursday a try. It will make you more aware of what you’re saying and of what others around you are trying to say. Join me in this exercise in semiotics. Together we might make the world slightly better, and we’ll get to have fun trying.

Spread the word about spreading out words. #NoAcronymThursday