I’ve been editing a Word document which we are then going to convert into a set of slides using Wimba Create.  A little way in, I started to feel that there was too much use of abbreviations such as etc., e.g. and i.e. – I then remembered that this text was destined to be displayed on a slide and so writing things out in full would result in something that was too wordy.  After that I restrained the urge to expand abbreviations.

But it was quite hard to exercise this restraint, because of the visual mismatch between the format of a Word document and the style required for something that is going to appear as slides. I wouldn’t have had a problem with editing the same text presented to me as slides.  This is a problem with the Wimba approach, where you create your slideshow as a Word document, and apply particular styles which tell Wimba where to put slide breaks and so on.