Principles

Instructions

• the term in question occurs in only one or two paragraphs in one part of the report;
• the term in question appears only a few times across the whole report;
• the same abbreviation is more commonly used with another meaning;
• the abbreviation is not widely recognised;
• there are a large number of other abbreviations in the same sentence or paragraph.

• write it out in full the first time it is used, with the abbreviated form following in brackets: the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); or the European Medicines Agency (the EMA);
• only capitalise the words used to make the abbreviation if the name is fixed in law, and not for policy areas and schemes, etc.; the common foreign and security policy (the CFSP); or the emissions trading scheme (the ETS);
• avoid repeating words after abbreviations, for example, do not write ‘the ERDF Fund’, since the word ‘fund’ is redundant;
• consider writing an abbreviation out in full again if it reappears in a later part of the report;
• as a general rule do not use abbreviations in the executive summary, or in the conclusions and recommendations section, unless very common (such as ‘EU’). They can, however, be used if the term is repeated many times, but write it out in full the first time it appears (including in the conclusions and recommendations section);
• include abbreviations used in the text of the report in the list of abbreviations;
• when abbreviations are used only
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  , and not in the text of the report, write out the full meaning in the key or in a note to the illustration, and not in the list of abbreviations.

• check that all abbreviations in the report text are included;
• check that no abbreviations are included that are not in the report;
• do not include abbreviations that are commonly known, such as EU, km;
• do not include ‘ECA’, since it is on the title page of the report.

• acronyms with up to five letters are usually uppercased: AIDS, COST, COVID-19, ECHO, EFTA, NASA, SHAPE;
• acronyms with six letters or more should normally be written with an initial capital followed by lower case: Benelux, Helios, Frontex, Assyst;
• when using the indefinite article, apply the rule ‘a before a consonant, an before a vowel’ as if the abbreviation following the article were being spoken: a UN resolution, a WTO representative, a NATO decision, but an NGO;
• initialisms generally take the definite article if the expression they stand for does: the OECD, the WTO, the EU, the ECA;
• plurals of abbreviations are formed in the usual way by adding a lower-case ‘s’. They do not take an apostrophe unless they are in the possessive: MEPs, DGs, ICTs, SMEs, UFOs but MEPs’ salaries;
• untranslated abbreviations from other languages should retain the capitalisation conventions of the original (e.g. GmbH);
• ‘Article’ may be abbreviated to Art., and member state to MS in footnotes or tables, but not in running text.

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