The big event this week for people on Twitter: the maximum size of a tweet went from 140 to 280 characters. Users had many opinions, for and against; I’m in the “against” camp.

In my opinion, the special nature of Twitter came from its short messages. They enabled fast reading and so made it possible to follow a swiftly-moving thread. You can’t skim multi-line messages the same way; they require closer reading. The number of characters has doubled, but not the value of the content.

I often recommend Twitter in my courses as a tool for developing writing skills. The value of the tool is based on learning how to craft a concise message. The 280-character tweets look like first drafts of 140-character tweets in need of an editor.

The number of characters also seems to affect the type of content. More and more, my stream includes Facebook-style stories. Obviously, through these changes, Twitter is targeting Facebook-style users rather than its current, more pragmatic users.

What can those of us who dislike this change do? Chrome users can download an add-on that cuts the tweet off after 140 characters. About a quarter of my Saturday morning tweet stream showed the red X left by this truncator.

Teaching and learning online are all about communication. An efficient educational message on the net is

• available
• noticeable
• usable
• understandable
• manageable.

An online instructor communicates openly and recognizably in whatever online channel he employs. He takes the affordances of the channel into account. Twitter-style micromessages arouse interest, and well-chosen links lead traffic to more in-depth materials. Usability thinking should be applied to the messages, not simply to the user interface. Educational texts should support search, scanning for highlights, and speed reading. An inverted-pyramid approach also works for educational writing, because it offers the main points right away rather than finishing with them like so many textbooks do. Following and managing the information flows in your field make up the core of e-learning. Make those tasks easier for students with efficient, effective communication.

On Thursday, I went to the Helsinki Book Fair. Fairs are a bit too marketing-focused; I prefer literary happenings that focus on discussion. My book purchases nowadays require careful consideration: I don’t have any more room on my shelves. If I buy new books, I have to get rid of some I already have.

At the fair, I noticed that two-euro bargain bookcases have taken over most of the fairgrounds. To me this is a sad example of the state of the traditional publishing industry. A high proportion of books, including some representing years of work by the author, will end up in the bargain bin, because even booklovers like me are reluctant to add to our collections.

Fortunately, the contents of the book aren’t confined to one format, as Niklas Bengtsson stated during an interview at the fair. Bengtsson described a wide range of forms that books have taken, from papyrus to a folded format, and wondered whether a man could be considered as a book if he has tattooed a poem collection on his skin.

New formats are electronic, and the bookcases at the Exhibition Center are passé. It seems that book fairs and publishing houses faithfully hold onto the old format because they haven’t figured out as profitable a revenue model for electronic publications.

A couple of weeks ago, a collection of articles entitled Texts of Life and Death was published. This anthology deals with the need for writing in social and health services. New requirements for documenting and reporting appear every day, but their impact on the main work is ignored. For example, Finnish daycare workers, who have jobs more like preschool or kindergarten teachers elsewhere,  spend several hours every week writing notes and updating records, further reducing the time spent actually caring for children.

The co-editor of the book, Ulla Tiililä, has often drawn attention to the fact that such writing is not really seen as additional work. Changes are made in the name of effective use of resources, but those imposing the changes often do not notice that they bring additional layers of review and consume time and money on needless paperwork.

Many articles in the collection offer concrete examples of the impact of these writing tasks, yet how little attention is given to them in discussion and research. Texts of Life and Death makes the work of workplace writing visible in a new way.

On Plain Language Day, October 13th, the Institute for the Languages of Finland organized a workshop with the theme of health, social services, and regional government reform. Spokesmen from two ministries described the hundred-word health and social services vocabulary, and also reminded participants about the use of plain language. Emmi Hyvönen, Communications Manager of Jyväskylä, politely responded that the material from the ministries was useful, but needed to be popularized. She emphasized a key point beyond the usual rubrics: organizations must test their texts on users; otherwise, there is no guarantee of comprehensibility. Another essential point came from plain language expert Ari Sainio: the content must be arranged from the perspective of the reader, not that of the organization. Finally, groups set to work trying to simplify some health and social service documents, tossing aside peculiar terms like unincorporated county enterprises. All in all, the workshop’s motto could have been “Write like a human, not like a bureaucrat”.

Do you know why medical exams often need to be cancelled at the last minute? Patients don’t read the instructions received in advance.

When the appointment is set up, the patient got written instructions covering items like “don’t eat or drink after midnight”. On arrival, when asked, the patient says things like “All I had was an apple” or “just a small glass of milk.” Even when the instructions include boxes, bold letters, and underlining to emphasize the fasting requirements, the problems persist.

My solution is to put the fasting instructions in the main headline: “Don’t eat or drink for six hours before your appointment, or the examination will have to be rescheduled.” Things that matter most should come first.

I described these exam-prep failures to a friend who had a medical appointment coming up. He knew enough to avoid eating and drinking during the time specified. However, the exam still had to be cancelled: his morning gum-chewing caused the problem.

How could we rewrite the notice to eliminate so simple an error? “Don’t put anything in your mouth for six hours before the exam”?

I’m starting to work as an ease-of-reading specialist at Selkokeskus.

The principles they advocate are like those I teach to public-sector writers. A specialist will analyze the perspective from which an article is written, the familiarity of its vocabulary, and the difficulty of its structure. Those three levels are key to readability.

But how can you maintain the reader’s motivation? It’s tempting for a poor reader to give up and not read the text through. So a supportive writer places hooks throughout the text to encourage the reader to continue.

Text that’s easy to read doesn’t overload working memory. Sentences and paragraphs are shorter, and the overall length of the piece looks manageable. The main topic appears near the beginning in case the reader doesn’t persist to the end.

Poor readers have limited experience with different types of writing. As a result they can have trouble distinguishing between news, opinion, and humor. One technique is to clearly mark each genre, even using different layout or background to separate a report from a casual piece. From the point of interpretation, the difference is essential.

Other layout tools also facilitate ease of reading. Larger fonts and shorter line lengths reduce barriers to the reader. The font size may be slightly larger than usual and the line shorter: a good length is 58 characters with spaces. As for images, they should be clear and informative; easy-to-read does not mean “show your cleverness.”

This format also works well for work-related writing and for items posted online. People rarely complain that something was too readable.

Much customer relations work is currently done through online services. Customers connect with an organization via chat, Twitter, Facebook, and email. These electronic channels are excellent when everything works. This, however, requires skilled personnel and effective back-up systems. A recent experience with Finnair inspired me to create this wish list for online customer service:

• The mission of customer service is to solve the customer’s problem.
• A quick answer is a plus, but it needs to move the issue toward a solution.
• Acknowledging a service error online benefits the company.
• If online service has a bug, a customer’s report should lead to action.
• When operational problems occur online, customer service needs tools that can resolve them in real time.
• Friendly messages and phrases lose their credibility if the issue doesn’t get resolved.
• You can’t solve a service problem by offering movie tickets.

What’s behind this list:

I bought a flight on Finnair from Helsinki to Montreal. I wanted a seat next to my travel companion and was prepared to pay for it. However, it turned out that this was a so-called codeshare flight, the kind that two airlines sell as it involved only one carrier rather than each handling only part of the trip.

I learned that on Finnair’s website I could only reserve seats on Finnair flights. They offered a link to British Airways’ seat selection. I completed the BA forms only to learn – on the last page – that they couldn’t accept my credit card. I redid the forms twice and tried three different cards. No luck.

When I reported the problem to Finnair’s customer service, the representatives responded kindly but could not take action “because it’s a codeshare.” I sent British Airways an e-mail only to be informed that it wasn’t the fault of their service. After trying again, I phoned BA’s customer service, where an agent took the details and promised to take care of the reservation. She ended up telling me that the seat was reserved, but five minutes later I got an email: “We could not charge your credit card.” Argh.

I gave up, but sent a description of the online service’s snafu to both companies and asked them to fix it. Finnair responded in a self-evident way (“If the reservation can’t be made in advance, we will assign the seat number at check-in”). British Airways sent a ten-page questionnaire and only later noted the defect in its system.

The essential point was that neither airline resolved the matter despite numerous contacts. Finnair’s interest in the problem seemed to evaporate once they got their payment. If online services do not work, the airline providing the service should be responsible for handling the issue or informing a passenger in advance that certain services are not available on codeshare flights.

My return journey started with American Airlines. At check-in, I asked – without any hope for success – whether it would be possible to reserve seats for the connecting flights. Surprisingly, I got the seats right away. When I praised the customer-friendly service, the agent replied, “That’s what they’re paying me for.”

Finnair: hint, hint.

When it comes to addressing the recipient of an official message, choosing a form of address is a greater challenge in Finnish than in English. Like many European languages, we have both a singular form of “you,” sinä, and a plural form, te. Finnish authorities have slowly turned to the less formal sinä in recent years, but many individual writers still feel unsure about doing so.

In her doctoral thesis, Eveliina Tolvanen examined uses of the second person by both Finnish and Swedish pension agencies. Swedish use of their singular form, du, was already common in official letters in the 1970s; in Finland, sinä has appeared more recently.

The practise for forms of address is not straightforward in Finnish. Depending on the situation, writers tend to shift between the second person plural and singular–or to avoid direct personal reference altogether. One of Tolvanen’s findings is that Finnish texts directly address the reader in positive situations (“you will receive,” “you now have the opportunity”). In negative contexts, Finnish writers often avoid direct address through techniques like the passive voice (“applications will no longer be accepted”).

Why does this matter? According to Tolvanen, direct address creates a relationship between the writer and the reader. The effect is twofold: the form of address reflects the social relationship and also strengthens it. Informal address creates or fosters closeness between the parties; formal address emphasizes social distance. While informal address is often seen as an acknowledgement of equality, it can also be viewed as an artificial closeness or even an attempt to gloss over inequality.

The quality of interactions, especially between officials and the public, depends on a variety of language choices, and not simply on the form of address.

Last week, the Finnish conductor and music teacher Atso Almila suggested that Twitter’s 140-character limit is fine if you leave out redundancies. Twitter poses a challenge for Finnish, where ordinary words can be quite lengthy, but concentrating on wording and grammar can pay off in English tweets as well.

To save just a few characters:

• Omit extra spaces: race track > racetrack.
  
• Leave out commas and quote marks: red green & blue; we saw Wonder Woman yesterday.
• Use shorter forms of words: initialize > start.
• Use a colon for and or is: The campaign launch is Tuesday > Tuesday: campaign launch.

When you need to trim a few more letters:

• Use numbers instead of words: the 12 chapters.
  
• Cut words that don’t alter the main idea, like auxiliary verbs and relative pronouns: the point that I had made > the point I made.
• Avoid intensifiers: (very) severe, (really) tardy.
• Use common or obvious abbreviations: September 19 > Sept 19.
• Use hashtags judiciously. Will #anyone #search for the #terms you’re #including?
• Embed the hashtag in context: Who’s at the XYZ conference? #Helsinki > Who’s at the XYZ #Helsinki conference?

Got other suggestions? Share them. And you may have noticed, many of these are good ideas for all kinds of writing, not just the concentrated communication of Twitter.