Your handy guide to the most common AP style abbreviations

But abbreviations can make it easier for your audience to read your piece rather than getting lost in a tangle of long company names or wordy industry terms.

Still, there are right ways and wrong ways to use abbreviations on everything from months to academic degrees to company names.

Let’s take a tour through how AP style, the gold standard for communicators, approaches a variety of different abbreviations. This list is not inclusive but should help you cover some of the most common situations you might run into.

Remember: It’s OK to develop your own house style that deviates from AP style. Just make sure you’re consistent — this is the perfect thing to include in your in-house style guide.

A note on acronyms

An acronym is a type of abbreviation where rather than shortening a single word — think “co.” instead of “company” — each word in a phrase is reduced to a letter or two. Examples of this might include a company name — Hewlett Packard on first reference, then HP thereafter — or a term, like return on investment becoming ROI.