MawtheMerrier
^Many readers will know that in English that the word 'a' before a consonant and 'an' before a vowel, is the indefinite article^
How patronising!
And many grannies also know how to suck eggs!.
No, not patronising, a statement of fact so as to be inclusive of anybody who did not know that. Even if there were one person who did not know that, then my including it would perhaps help that person and cause them not to feel excluded.
I know that sometimes I have read items - I don't mean on Gransnet - where an author has used an abbreviation and I have not known what it means.
Sometimes fairly easy to find out on the web, sometimes not.
I was taught, and try to follow, a practice of always writing out the meaning of an abbreviation when first using it.
So, if, say, I were writing about producing a PDF (Portable Document Format) document, I would, as here, include the meaning of the abbreviation the first time I used it. I could then write about various aspects of producing a PDF document, such as the embedding of a subset of a font in a PDF document and the reasons for doing that, using the abbreviation as needed.
When writing I try to explain, in the hope of conveying meaning and enabling understanding by the reader, not simply produce a quantity of words as if answering an examination question for what I write to become read by an examiner with existing knowledge of the topic.
By the way, do you know of the Spanish poet who is thought to have first used the phrase about sucking eggs and of the city where a poem by him is displayed on an outside wall, a city where many poems by many poets and in various languages are displayed on outside walls and that many of the poems are displayed in images within Google street view?
