On Thursday, I was asked what the abbreviation DV stood for in a short passage in English. The meaning could not be interpreted from the context. I did searches in various sources and found more than twenty alternatives, but none of them seemed appropriate. I asked a teacher, a native English speaker, but he didn’t know how to interpret it, either. The case clearly illustrates how burdensome it can be for a reader if a writer decides to save a few characters rather than place himself in the reader’s position. A readability researcher once mentioned that an acronym is like a black mark over printed text; slowing if not preventing interpretation. The safest course is to spell abbreviations out at least the first time they’re used. I ended up deciding that DV probably stood for “domestic violence”. Would that have been your guess?