Careful writers use etc. to refer to things, and et al. to people. Et is a complete word, but al. needs the period to denote abbreviation. Because they lack a complete understanding of the proposal process, they are a continuous impediment to us when we initiate requests for bids.
Many writers have a tendency to add certain nouns to phrases without adding meaning or precision.
They wanted a database type system. We are in an economic downturn situation. He was interested in the distributed processing concept.