The reason why abbreviations have been popular hundreds of years ago and why they still remain so today is that they help us save space and time. Obviously, it takes a lot less effort to write SARS than it would if you were to write “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”, the whole phrase that it stands for. In addition, in the modern world, there sometimes is the need to fit as much information as possible into one message while having a limited amount of characters. For instance, Twitter doesn’t allow tweets to be longer than 280 characters. It’s natural to shorten all the words that can be shortened, to make sure that everything you want to say fits into a single tweet.

Abbreviations can take various forms, and there isn’t a rule that would strictly define how words can or can’t be shortened. One option is representing the word by its first letter or by the first few letters, e.g. v. for verb and Co. for company. Some abbreviations take the most important letters of the word, such as Ltd. that stands for limited, or Revd that stands for Reverend. A single word can also be shortened by taking only the first and the last letter, e.g. Dr. for Doctor, Rd. for road. It’s also common that first letters of the words in a phrase are used instead of a whole phrase. Examples are BTW for by the way and RSVP for répondez s’il vous plaît.

Many abbreviations appeared at the end of the 20th century when people started sending each other text messages. These are most commonly first letters of the words in a phrase, such as TMI that stands for too much information. Sometimes letters are replaced with numbers to make an abbreviation; thus, L8r stands for later.

Often quite a few questions arise when it comes to abbreviations. Do I use a full stop after the shortened version of the word? Do I use lowercase or uppercase letters? What do I do if I need a plural form? These are just some of those questions. However, just as it is with the majority of English grammar, practice makes perfect. If you keep using abbreviations in your writing, you soon will have no problems with them.