For a small flight of fancy, imagine if each program had a --for-docs argument, which causes it to simply spit out the canonical long-form version equivalent to whatever else it has been called with.

Or, a separate program that can convert from short to long form:

> for-docs "ls -lrth /mnt/data"

ls -l --reverse -t --human-readable -- /mnt/data

(I'd put in an option to put the options alphabetically too)