Re:Show HN: Strength News – An HN-inspired website for sport...
by Raro on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @02:16PM
(#18666826)
The general style guide is to "write it how you say it":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Indefinite_a...
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/A...
Of course there will be variants where you'd just have to make a decision (e.g. how do you pronounce SQL?)
One note: technically, 'HN' is an initialism; acronyms are special cases of initialisms that are pronounceable.
Re:Show HN: Strength News – An HN-inspired website for sport...
by atom-morgan on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @02:12PM
(#18666783)
> when you have an acronym that you tend to say the individual letters of, do you change the a/an?
It depends on the sound the acronym, or initialism, starts with. So "an FBI" because you say "EFF-BEE-EYE" vs. "a CIA agent".
I say "H. N." in my head whenever I see Hacker News as an acronym.
My question is, when you have an acronym that you tend to say the individual letters of, do you change the a/an? For example, this example would be "an aech en inspired ...", where if you read the acronym as "Hacker News", it would be "a Hacker News inspired...".
Another common example is FBI.
It always irks me when I see "a FBI agent", but I'm not sure which is actually correct.