An individual subscription is only A$60 per year
Group and student discounts may apply
Australian manual of scientific style Start communicating effectively
Acronyms and initialisms both consist of a string of letters that are the first letters of each word of the title or phrase they refer to. Each letter is usually capitalised. The term acronym is often used to cover both acronyms and initialisms, but there is a difference between them.
The letters of an acronym can be pronounced as a single word:
The letters of an initialism are pronounced one by one, as separate syllables:
A few of these shortened forms may be pronounced either way – for example, WHO (World Health Organization). They may thus be treated as either acronyms or initialisms.
Shortened forms that have the same spelling as normal words (eg WHO, POW, PIN) can raise accessibility issues because of the way they are treated by screen readers. For web writing, it is a good idea to define terms on every webpage because of this issue.
Neither acronyms nor initialisms are punctuated with full stops. Add an s, without an apostrophe, for acronyms and initialisms that take a plural:
This section also covers: