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Latin Is So Out of Fashion

March 27, 2016 by gomarketing

Major style manuals (for example, The Chicago Manual of Style and the Modern Language Association Style Manual) agree that Latin abbreviations, such as, etc., e.g., and i.e., should not appear in your everyday writing. You should only use them in footnotes, endnotes, tables, and other forms of documentation.

So instead of writing i.e. (the abbreviation of id est), in your business report, write that is. Instead of writing e.g. (the abbreviation of exempli gratia), in your cover letter, write for example. Let’s face it, most people don’t know what the abbreviations stand for—I often see i.e. and e.g. used interchangeably—so using them can affect the clarity of your writing… in a bad way.

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