Abbreviations and initials are a writing simplifier. Some of them make sense and have become accepted in both spoken language and publishing.

- Rather than have to write out Federal Bureau of Investigation, you simple write FBI.

- You don’t tune in your television to the American Broadcasting Company, you watch ABC.

- That crime show you watch was Crime Scene Investigation, but we’ll know what you mean if you tell us you watch CSI

However, some abbreviations that are normal within the industry or company you work for may not be known outside of that sphere. If you use unknown or ambiguous initials or abbreviation in your website or marketing copy, you could cause confusion for your readers. A confused reader will be less compelled to act on the ideas within your website or marketing materials.

A year ago, I was writing and editing website copy for a women’s shelter for survivors of domestic violence, and I was constantly changing two abbreviations that had developed consistent usage by the management of the shelter. The first was “API”, which stands for Asian Pacific Islander. This particular racial demographic was the shelter’s primary target, and the shelter would use the initialization freely, but rarely would type out the full meaning. If a reader were to come across “API” on the website, without any contexual knowledge of the shelter, they might have thought it meant something else. Application Program Interface, American Petroleum Institute, and American Parasite Instance are all definitions that  Google returns when you search “API”, before you reach “a race/origin used by the Census Bureau that consists of Asian and Pacific Islander descent.”

On the same shelter’s site, they would regularly use the abbreviation DV for domestic violence. Like most abbreviations, it saves the writer a lot of letters and can get across the same meaning. Keep in mind that using abbreviations and initialization within your writing is fine, if, on each page where the initials appear, you type out the full meaning followed by the abbreviation at least once. Readers would know the initials of the first time it is written on a page or article if it read “domestic violence (DV)”, but once again, you do not want to confuse the reader with inside acronyms that may not be known in the outside world.

Marketing and website copy needs to clearly inform the reader about the company, product, or service the writer is describing. Be cautious about overusing abbreviations and initials that may be knows to those within the company and industry, but may be unknown to the casual reader.