What Manual of Style instructs writers to use sentence case for acronyms? The BBC (and Rob B. in the first word of this article “Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams…” though I haven’t noted historic acronym inconsistencies in his case) has a habit of odd acronym capitalization.
Just look at this BBC article, and you see the following acronyms:
BBC (they always get this one correct)
UK (woo-hoo, another one correct)
Nasa (why?)
Esa (space agencies get the shaft I think)
ISS (huzzah)
LSP (good on them)
Desert Rats (NASA lists it as Desert RATS because of the acronym)
SSTL (their UK-based, so it’s of course correct)
GNSS (nailed it)
SpacePNT (matches the company’s website)
I’m all for dropping the period for a separator (USA rather than U.S.A.), and I will use scuba rather than SCUBA, but at least on BBC.com I see some rather strange choices at times when compared to any other news site.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go yell at some clouds.
