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April 25, 2010I’m writing a college essay about why i want to study the major im choosing. My major is Advertising & Marketing Communications. I was wondering it is OK to shorten it to AMC, seeing as how i use it a lot in my essay and takes up a lot of word space. On the colleges’ website they shorten it like that, so would it be OK?
I’m writing a college essay about why i want to study the major im choosing. My major is Advertising & Marketing Communications. I was wondering it is OK to shorten it to AMC, seeing as how i use it a lot in my essay and takes up a lot of word space. On the colleges’ website they shorten it like that, so would it be OK?
Horaayy..there are 5 comment(s) for me so far ;)
Do it at your own risk. Some may not appreciate / understand.
You can do it only if you going to mention Advertising and Marketing Communication (AMC) more than once and then write like I just did.
Write it out the first time, then put the abbreviation in parentheses. Every subsequent time can be written as just the abbreviation. It’s actually a standard thing to do in any form of technical writing.
You need to do it the proper way. One way you can do this is mention the entire major the first time and then make a notation that going forward that this terminology will be named as “…”.
Well, I agree with everyone else, that as long as you write it out the first time and follow it with the abbreviation in parentheses, you can refer to the abbreviation later. But, the reason I responded was because I wanted to caution you about using the term over and over again. I can not imagine an essay on such a topic that would call for using the term AMC more than once or twice. If you are using it a lot, perhaps you are writing a bad essay. For example if you have written:
‘I am majoring in AMC. Since I was a little kid advertising has always seemed exciting. And this is exactly what I will get from the AMC degree. In the AMC degree I will be able to explore how to communicate while trying to sell junk to old people. I feel that AMC is the degree that most fits my goals in life.’
Well, that’s a bad essay, for a number of reasons, but the reason I am pointing out is that the terms AMC is used too much. Try instead
‘Since I was a little kid advertising has always seemed exciting. I have always had an interest for communicating while trying to sell junk to old people. As such, the AMC degree best fits my goals in life.’
Though this is still a bad essay, it is much less bad because it uses the term AMC sparingly. In these essays, I promise you, repetition of any word is not a good thing. And repetition of the name of your programs seems rather useless and easily avoidable. I strongly recommend you go back through your essay and see if you can cut the number of times you use the term AMC down to no more than two (one would be better). A good rule of thumb when writing these types of things is to try to make your essay as dense with meaning as possible using as few words as possible. And the name of your program, after the first mention, has no added meaning but lots of added words (abbreviated or not).
By the way, the word ‘I’ is also a word that should be used as sparingly as possible (though I know my examples used it a lot… hey, I’m not applying, so it doesn’t matter for me).
Good luck with your application.