I'm writing a rather tehnical report with a lot of abbreviations such as QoS (quality of service), AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and HMAC (Hash-based Message Authentication Code).
When should the explanation of the abbreviation be capitalized? For example, should it be quality of service or Quality of Service? How does one know what to use for the vast majority of technical abbreviations?
Best Answer
According to the Wikipedia Manual of Style, these are some rules on the matter (I'll paste it):
So: don't capitalize if the words are "common" and capitalize if the acronym refers to proper names. See also page 81 in this document.