Public reports by national commissions, governors' conferences, and leadership groups have stressed the great need fo...
ShedApril 27, 2020
"If" Diagram Best Approach
I understand that If introducing a Sufficient (S) condition and the other part of the Necessary (N) condition. What is the best strategy for picking which words to abbreviate? I find that my diagrams can be very long sometimes or trying to deciding what to use, I take up too much my time.
For example, for this sentence: If the country is to remain a leading nation in an era of international competitiveness, the need is undeniable.
My diagram starting out like this:
RLNIC --> UN
Not UN --> not RLNIC
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Thanks for the question! So really, what matters with picking what words you abbreviate is picking the ones that make sense to you. As long as you can use them consistently, it’s fine, since these are meant to be shortcuts to aid your comprehension of the material.
That being said, there are some pretty standard tricks that people use. For example, keeping only the most essential parts, and focusing on things like important nouns or verbs. And what is important or not important will depend on the specific question you’re working with.
So for the sentence you had, for example: If the country is to remain a leading nation in an era of international competitiveness, the need is undeniable.
What’s important here? Well, obviously the subject of the sentence, the country. And what are things we can drop out? Articles like “the” and “a,” and “to be” verbs are good candidates. So honestly, I think that
CRLNIC —> UN
isn’t a bad diagram. If you want to make it even shorter, notice that the “in an era of international competitiveness” part isn’t super important, so we could also diagram it
CRL —> NU
But don’t worry too much about having acronyms that are too long. As you can see here, we shaved off a couple of letters, but if you feel more comfortable with more letters, it’s really what you feel most comfortable with.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
