Last week, senior specialist Ulla Tiililä brought up an interesting case: her organization’s web copy, along with her own article, was plagiarized in a column that appeared in Talouselämä magazine. When Tiililä reported about this, she documented her case with highlighted images showing several identical or nearly identical passages.

The opening of the Talouselämä column is copied directly from the website. In the next section, the column deals with a Vaasa University research which Tiililä discussed in her own article. And in the final section the columnist used Tiililä’s original example with a few numbers updated. All in all, the column essentially repeated Tiililä’s work. There was no acknowledgement of her as the author until after she’d contacted the magazine.

This is not the first time that an expert’s work was misappropriated. The “borrower” builds a story, but the material is all someone else’s. With luck, that expert will find his name attached to a brief quote. More often, the original author is left out entirely, as happened to Tiililä. Unfair, and unethical.

I’m more enthusiastic about Snapchat than about Instagram. I like the speed and conciseness of snap picture messages. The disadvantage is the loose video talk that bores people in the same way as in vlogs. Snaps are, however, shorter and less tedious.

I’ve been following snaps to see what workplaces can do with them. Few organizations currently use Snapchat; those who do, don’t post often. The most enthusiastic snappers are TV and radio celebrities such as Arman Alizad who market their own shows. But who wants to follow a stream of ads?

The public sector offers some good examples: the Finnish Tax Administration uses Snapchat togive concise instructions and to translate tax terms into plain language. The European Parliament, for its part, uses its trainees from all over the world to describe its work in a light but factual way.

However, the most interesting of all have been snaps created by Lööppi, an association of journalism students at the University of Jyväskylä. Students from around the world take turns sharing their snaps. You get reports from Melbourne, Spokane, Groningen and other corners of the world. The snaps combine worthwhile content with personal viewpoints.

I’ve given thought to the merits of open versus private sharing of snaps. Private messages work well in this medium; success with open content requires additional work for the person snapping, and the actual benefits can be minimal. As with other social media, it’s not enough just to be on Snapchat; you need to have a purpose, and you need to plan your approach.

In a seminar for non-fiction writers, we wondered whether scholars and other authors receive harsher feedback in the era of social media. The topic seems to be an essential factor: if you discuss immigration, discrimination, health issues, Russia, or protecting wolves, the hate messages begin to fly. In a survey taken by the Committee for Public Information, 78% of respondents said they received feedback via email, and 77% through face-to-face interactions. Only 40% reported social media as a channel.

Although the phenomenon is not directly linked to social media, these new channels have made harassment more visible while also making it easier. All harassment is unacceptable, and online forums need tools for monitoring and reporting. It’s also important to show clear, collegial support for the targets of harassment.

The Committee for Public Information’s survey began in 2015; this year’s survey remains open, and you still have a week if you’d like to participate.

On Thursday, I was asked what the abbreviation DV stood for in a short passage in English. The meaning could not be interpreted from the context. I did searches in various sources and found more than twenty alternatives, but none of them seemed appropriate. I asked a teacher, a native English speaker, but he didn’t know how to interpret it, either. The case clearly illustrates how burdensome it can be for a reader if a writer decides to save a few characters rather than place himself in the reader’s position. A readability researcher once mentioned that an acronym is like a black mark over printed text; slowing if not preventing interpretation. The safest course is to spell abbreviations out at least the first time they’re used. I ended up deciding that DV probably stood for “domestic violence”. Would that have been your guess?

On Saturday, in the Helsinki Sanomat newspaper, I read Riitta Koivuranta‘s column “What’s important in reading: not speed, but comprehension.” This was a defense of slow reading, and dealt primarily with fiction. My own work relates to reading and writing everyday texts in the workplace. I can assure you that speed reading makes sense with such documents. I attended a course twenty years ago, taught by Dr. Jörgen Poulsen, who specialized in training speed-reading instructors. The course was useful, and after that I gave some speed-reading courses myself and also applied the principles to other contexts. The core message is that different techniques apply to different materials. You don’t savor each word slowly when reading agendas and reports; you want to grab the main point and go. With leisure reading, each person ambles along whatever path seems appealing, without a cost-benefit analysis. However, when reading with a clear purpose, like business needs or government guidelines, you want to march efficiently toward your goal. Effective speed reading will guide you to adequate understanding in minimal time. According to Poulsen, speed reading is like taking the superhighway: when the destination is more important than the journey, that’s the route to take.

I insist on understandable text. I want writers to change obscure terms to everyday words, and to shorten long phrases in order to increase readability. But do these things really improve understanding? Many external factors such as the reader’s previous knowledge have an impact on comprehension. Britt-Louise Gunnarsson found when examining legal language that basic editing changes didn’t make the legal text much easier to understand. To read is to work through different levels – first characters, then words, and then sentences – in order to interpret the text as a whole. At the final stage of comprehension, the reader will realize the action that the text is leading him to. In her research, Gunnarsson found that changes in the lower levels of the text did not improve comprehension. Changes need to focus on higher concerns – for example, the perspective from which the content is approached. The usual readability factors affect superficial understanding, while the perspective enables deeper understanding. What this meant for legal texts, according to Gunnarsson, is that comprehension improved when issues were examined from a citizen’s viewpoint, not from the court’s.

Place names carry all kinds of information. The Netherlands has a number of city names ending with -dam: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Vollendam, Zaandam, Veendam, and so on. This name ending reflects the damming of water from such rivers as the Amstel and the Rotte and tells us about the local geography. In the Netherlands, and also in Germany, many place names end with -ingen: Groningen, Vlaardingen, Vlissingen, Wageningen. Originally, -ingen referred to residents of a place. Place names also may relate to local products, as with the Dutch cheese towns of Gouda, Edam, and Maasdam. The former maritime reach of the Netherlands has left place names far from the windmills and dikes. In what was Nieuw-Amsterdam, now New York, you can find Harlem (Haarlem), the Bronx (after Dutch settler Jonas Bronck), Coney Island (Konijneneiland ‘rabbit island’), Wall Street (Walstraat) and Staten Island (Staaten Eylandt ‘state’s land’).

An explanation for this week’s word? I’m writing from the university city of Groningen.

How can organizations make the best use of social media? The first thought for many of them, whether corporations or public-sector groups, is to do broadcast-style marketing. However, experience has shown that advertising mostly irritates the social media audience. I asked several active Twitter users what kind of content they look for from corporate accounts. Some of the most frequent answers were:

– useful, engaging content
– genuine interaction
– customer service
– insights into the company’s work
– product or service updates
– fresh ideas about their field.

Along with diversified content, people wanted a relaxed, conversational stream, not ads or mini press releases. Those serve mainly to drive away potential followers. Accounts that people found to be the most interesting tended to be managed by individual employees who convey information about the organization in a personal way. According to my respondents, the public sector seems to use social media better than the private sector does.

I’ve just finished reading Kansalaistaito (Civics) by Vesa Heikkinen and Tapio Pajunen; it was among last year’s candidates for the Tieto-Finlandia Award for non-fiction. In one section, the authors use parts of speech to analyze political language. One of the most popular nouns in politics is people. People is useful in many situations: it can integrate by referring to the public as a whole, or differentiate by separating ordinary people from an imagined elite, or our countrymen from other nationalities. Politicians also love verbs like reform and impersonal uses of to be. Usage like “it is” or “things are” doesn’t lead anywhere, but does help the speaker describe and classify issues. To say that something existing will be reformed is to convey a positive message while avoiding details. The number one adjective in politics is good. The “good” state of affairs is presented as fact, but mostly it’s simply opinions. As for pronouns, the most popular ones for politicians are we, us, our. They’re an inviting, efficient start on the path to persuasion. We-speak creates a team spirit, although it’s sometimes unclear who is and is not included in us. An important skill for citizens is understanding that words do not have a single, unchanging meaning; their meaning shifts according to the speaker’s purposes.