Could I please calmly and politely request AGAIN that posters not use acronyms unless

[NullTuples]

84. How about we follow the established standard of spelling it out the first time?

That's been the journalistic standard for a half-century that I'm personally anecdotally aware of. Spell it out, put the acronym in parenthesis, then it's okay to use throughout the rest of the piece.

Example:

"Vladimir Putin took control of what was once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He then proceeded to use the resources of the USSR to make himself and a select group of friends incredibly wealthy. His ultimate goal was to destroy the United States of America (USA), which had been the adversary of the USSR for half a century."


Note: Some would argue that it's okay to not spell out an acronym if it's already in wide use, such as USA in the example above. This is a matter of debate since "wide use" determination can be quite relativistic. A term may be in wide use within the writer's subculture but unknown outside of it.