Laws should be written so that a citizen with an elementary school education is able to understand them. But is it always possible to write laws with such simple language? Are problems of understanding related to language or to content? Can those even be distinguished from each other? These questions are dealt with in the article How to Examine the Formation of Legal Text and its Genre Boundaries? by Salli Kankaanpää, Aino Piehland, Matti Räsänen.

The authors participated in the drafting of the Housing Companies Act and made 225 proposals to improve its readability. Which of the proposals were adopted? Most of them tried to make the wording less abstract and bring it closer to everyday language. Some proposals added information to make statements more understandable for laymen. The lawmakers approved half of the suggestions that made the language more concrete, but less than one-third of those adding further information.

Changes in structure were more acceptable than those related to vocabulary; perhaps the latter was seen as interfering with the content. But the law – like any other text – builds its meaning with language. It could well be that many improvements were rejected due to a narrow conception of language. As one legislator said of the original wording that seemed appropriately legalistic, “There’s nothing wrong with this text; it’s just that I don’t understand it.”

On Saturday, The Finnish Association of Non-Fiction Writers held a social media course at the House of Science. Before the course, participants were asked to create a Twitter profile for themselves. We wanted to give these new tweeps a hands-on experience, so at the end of the day we organized a Twitter chat. The idea is familiar to and frequently used by e-learning professionals, but this was the first time I tried it in a course with Twitter novices. Many groups hesitate to test the waters of a fast-paced public Twitter stream, but non-fiction writers are competent, self-directed people; they didn’t hold back. The result? Many responses (Storify summary, in Finnish) to the chat’s questions, along with lots of retweets and favorites. It worked so well that I think I’ll make chat a permanent part of my other Twitter courses. In fact, I think this technique is even better suited to training than to open discussions, where the number of participants, especially those tweeting in Finnish, is small and the steam often fails to reach critical mass.

This weekend, I watched slide shows made by participants in my course. Despite the bad reputation of PowerPoint presentations, I’m confident that we’ll never return to the slideless era. What matters is the weight of the slides in the presentation as a whole. What would I myself like to watch during a speech? A good slide show has a consistent appearance, but the slide template should not be too dominant; you don’t need your logo taking up 25% of every slide. Uniform colors, font types and sizes provide a clear visual impression. In general, text should appear in grammatic, complete sentences, and it shouldn’t be arranged in multi-level lists. The slides should convey serious content lightly. Slides crammed with text aren’t simply boring; they look like speaker notes that snuck onto the screen. Slides with lovely images and brief aphorisms are boring as well, just in a different way. A presentation needs variety. A long parade of slides, all with bullet points or all with images, lulls the audience to sleep — and the cure is not to make the bullets bounce or spin. Ultimately, the crucial test of the content is its impact: does it deliver value to the listeners, or only to the speaker?

In Finland, the latest social media fury was stirred up by economic crime investigators Anne and Jutta. In a social media campaign against the underground economy where entrepreneurs avoid taxes and other fees, these officers warned people on Facebook and Twitter about the risks of six-euro pizzas. At that price, the investigators charged, it’s highly unlikely that the vendors were paying the required fees and taxes. The campaign drew a lot of negative response. People saw the police as taking the side of the restaurant association while ignoring the price manipulation and tax optimization that big businesses use. Instead of going after the big guys, the cops seemed to be targeting vulnerable small entrepreneurs—many of who are immigrants.

So what went wrong with this social media campaign? Any time people try to harness social media purely to push a product, a person, or an issue, they’re setting themselves up for failure. Such a campaign is like a robocall: a one-way, inflexible delivery of someone’s message. Even the campaign’s replies are canned, delivered without taking in the previous discussion, let alone the nature of the channel. Instead of learning from similar social media gaffes, single-issue advocates keep trying to apply the outdated Magic Bullet model of communication to new media.

Experts who make presentations can profit from having listened to them. Think of how often an audience is the victim of someone practicing how to read aloud with PowerPoint. So how can a speaker present effectively? Long before you start speaking, you need a clear objective: you can’t hit the target if you don’t know where to aim. Once you have the objective, shape the takeaway message into one concise sentence. Use that as a compass for staying on course as you develop the presentation. And when you do present, stay flexible: instead of unloading a pre-recorded speech, invite your audience to have a voice. Often their needs become clear only during the presentation. Another question: how to maintain interest and overcome short attention spans? Few people get excited about bullet points, but real-life cases and stories draw people in. A professional is also able to talk about his expertise in plain language rather than humblebragging with insider jargon. Surprises add spice to a presentation, but exceeding the time limit is like overcooking a meal.

At the Vapriikki Museum Center, an interesting exhibition on typography has just ended. The exhibition was designed by Markus Itkonen, and it used fifteen information panels to explore and discuss typography. The word typography comes from Greek: typos ‘general form, character; outline’ andgraphein ‘to write’. In the past, letters were painstakingly cut from wood or metal, so fonts were few, but in the digital era we have nearly 200 000. Upper case letters emerged in first century Rome, and the Trajan typeface, for example, faithfully mimics inscriptions of Roman monuments. Lower case letters appeared much later, in the ninth century. Letter types have changed not only because of printing technologies but also because of the needs of society: in the 1970s designers developed typefaces for airports (Frutiger) and road signs (Transport), aiming for them to be easily read from a distance. The proliferation of printers in the 1980s required fonts without fine detail or thin arcs. On current digital displays, readers have to be able to recognize small, pixelated letters, and for this need fonts like Verdana have been developed. According to the exhibition, the permanent favorites of professionals are Helvetica, Garamond and Frutiger, while Comic Sans and Times are the fonts they love to hate.

I went to the Venice Biennale, which is held every second year as the name suggests (biennale = bi ‘two’ + annus ‘year’). This overview of contemporary art can challenge the layman, so exploring details of the exhibition in advance makes sense. I read about the Biennale in Taide (Art) magazine, but the artspeak seems to pose more obstacles than the art itself. One exhibit, a leather-worker’s workshop, seemed as if it would be more accessible. What did the article say, though? “Artistic thinking (to use Luis Camnitzer’s term), seems in our decadent, anthropocentric present, to retain a marginal position, one that Maria Papadimitriou re-creates with a multi-level allegory in the Greek pavilion, with her rustic workshop selling the pelts of wild animals.” The article says nothing else about this work, so what can you possibly derive from these lines? A search for Camnitzer unearths a few pieces of information: he’s an Uruguayan-German artist, and he sees the art of thinking as ‘knowledge acquisition and organizing’. But why did the article plop him into text already overloaded with names and foreign words? I have no idea. As for words like anthropocentric, what do they add that, for example, “human-centered” would not? The critic’s style hampers understanding of a none-too-original point: this work is a multi-level metaphor for the minor position of artistic thinking in today, a time that the critic sees as decadent and too focused on human beings.

On Thursday, I was in the ”Tuomiokapituli” (Cathedral Chapter house) and I had the chance to examine church language with the help of a couple of dictionaries. Even the name Tuomiokapituli made me think about the meaning and origin of words. I had previously discovered that the related word ”tuomiokirkko” (doom + church, ’cathedral’) includes a translation error. Our Finnish word is based on the Swedish ”domkyrkan”, whose first part comes from the Latin domus ‘home, house.’ Finns mistakenly assumed the Germanic dom ’doom’, and so our churches are much more threatening than others in Europe. “Kapituli” comes from Latin through Swedish more successfully: capitulum ‘chapter’, capitula ‘the assembly’. I also noticed that church language, in general, includes vocabulary that’s somewhat unfamiliar although the things it refers to still exist. Would it be possible to translate into everyday language words like sin, merciful and pastoral care, so that the meaning would be free from ecclesiastical baggage? Sin could become an evil act, merciful could become gentle, and pastoral care could become counseling. Archaic terms in our own language can sound to us laymen like a form of Church Latin, with the meaning of the strange words being twisted or lost. In the same way, the medieval Latin “hoc est enim corpus meum” was allegedly transformed by misunderstanding to the magic word hocus-pocus.

Lately, I’ve had to consider the intricacies of academic writing. Going through piles of dissertations, I repeatedly turn indignant because of unnecessarily difficult and verbose expression. In one place, authors put battalions of complicated concepts on parade without adding anything useful to the study; in another, you find multiple international citations deployed to illustrate the most obvious point. In my real job, I often wrestle officialese into understandable, everyday language, so it’s a real strain trying to adapt to the jargon of the academic world. My research advisors have asked me to write “more scientifically,” which means with detailed documentation of each phase of the study, a rationale for each argument, and the linking of each concept to prior research through references. Moreover, the tedious dissertation format demands that you first describe what you are going to discuss, then you discuss it, and finally you describe what you have just discussed. If a study has value for people outside the world of academia, it won’t appear in print without being completely rewritten. But even with moderate changes to format and style, academic studies could have far more impact on society.

The inspiring Tietokirja.fi event, a biennial celebration of nonfiction, took place at the House of Science in Helsinki during the last week of August. Although there were many high quality sessions in the same time slot, the room was packed for our social media panel. The panelists were Markus Leikola, Ville Lähde and me, chaired by Anne Rutanen. Our discussion focused on how writers can take advantage of social media. Everyone agreed that simply advertising our own work is not working. Through Twitter “polls, I have found that people will tolerate just one or two announcements for the same item or event. So what value can social media offer if you can’t advertise? Markus Leikola is using social media as a testing ground for his writing exercises. Ville Lähde, in turn, publishes excerpts of his manuscript on his blog and discusses them with readers. For the writer’s lonely work, social media can provide a kind of community network. Recently, here in Finland, social media has again been closely tied to hate speech, with some papers closing their discussion forums. Our panel talked about how knowledge workers use social media for everyday tasks, which the media seems to ignore completely.