1Last week, along with companies using a certain service provider, I got a communication about some minor changes to its operations. This was the closing:

Wishing you nice frosty days,
The girls in Customer Service

The words gave me pause, so I asked for other opinions on the Language Police forum. The discussion was lively: I ended up with 51 comments.

In general, people considered the wording favorably; 40 people gave their approval with likes. A positive tone is often crucial, and it helps us overlook small shortcomings. People praised this closing, rightly I think, for its lightness, its good temper, and its friendly warmth.

The most interesting issue to me was the word “girls.” While I’m not oversensitive to gendered language, it did bring me up short. The wording didn’t seem appropriate for a business communication. In the discussion on the forum, people considered ”girls” from many angles. About twenty people shared the view that ”girls” is fine if the women use it themselves. “Girls” was considered light, friendly and warm but perhaps a bit too familiar.

Twenty other participants considered “girls” unsuitable. “It shouldn’t be allowed.” “It’s not businesslike. It’s unprofessional.” “It really stuck out.” One interesting question was what the impact would have been for “the boys of Customer Service.”

Many comments dealt with the impact of the wording: would this usage give a kind of permission to use “girls” for women in other situations? And what image did “girls” conjure up? Does it imply that customer service is women’s work, something not to take seriously? Would professionals end an announcement with a phrase like “Best regards, the girls of Acme Corporate Lawyers?”

Based on the discussion, I came to the conclusion that in general the word ”girls” in this kind of message didn’t bother most readers. However, it did raise mixed feelings and that’s why it’s better to choose a more neutral expression.

To maintain some kind of Twitter presence, many cities are sending autotweets of announcements and events . Automatic tweets don’t take much time, but they ignore the advantages of interaction. For a person following the city’s feed, clusters of automatic messages are not too interesting. For example, a person might see a string of virtually identical tweets about events or job openings, and the sameness makes them difficult to distinguish from one another. Out of 120 tweets selected at random from the City of Tampere, over 37 percent were standardized event notifications—mostly about story hour for children at the library. Announcements of course have a place in a city’s feed, but so do many other forms of communications. An autotweet approach is likely to convey impersonality while hindering contact, much like do-not-reply emails. Citizens on Twitter are capable of hearing and even discussing tougher topics than story hour. Twitter as a platform could be an incomparable tool for encouraging debate and participation.

I looked at the official Twitter streams for three similar-sized cities—Tampere, Espoo and Oulu—picking the most recent 120 tweets for each in the November to January timeframe. Here’s what each city’s Twitter profile tells me:

Tampere has 15,200 tweets, follows 164 accounts, and has 10,100 followers.
Espoo has 3,548 tweets, follows 377, and has 3,605 followers.
Oulu has 22,200 tweets, follows 121, and has 5,741 followers.

How the cities make use of Twitter is made clear by the fact that the samples contained very few discussion tweets: Tampere had 15, Espoo 11, and Oulu none. Another way to measure interactivity is through follow-ups and retweets. Tampere retweeted 35 times, Espoo 50, and Oulu once again had none. Building networks is apparently not a big deal for cities; so far the emphasis has been on the one-way distribution of newsletters, event announcements and job openings.

Euphemisms are soft expressions that we wrap around difficult issues. Civilians aren’t killed in a war; they become collateral damage. Even on the home front, at the end of a long illness, people don’t die; they pass away. Last week, I heard that the medical expression stick to conservative treatment usually means do nothing. In the world of work, that sounds like a better solution than improving operational efficiency, which usually meanslaying workers off. Finnish political language today is packed with euphemisms: developing means do more with less money. And of course the labor reserve, whom you might more easily recognize as unemployed people, no longer faces difficulties but challenges. One such challenge for workers between jobs is their inability to sell innovations (formerly ideas) to companies. Luckily, they too have an opportunity: they can contribute to society and gain valuable experience – in other words, work for free

I’ve decided to switch from being a language cop to being a change agent. For over ten years I’ve been talking about plain language to officials and experts, but now I want to move from speech to action. If an organization delivers training courses, it should have concrete results in mind from the start. That’s why I’ve decided to set a clear change objective for every training program I provide. This also requires commitment from the participants, because they are ultimately responsible for results. In addition, I’ve refined how I motivate change. I no longer rely on logic alone; instead I’m trying to harness the bandwagon effect. If a neighboring unit has already implemented the change, it’s easier to convince a new group to get on board. So in addition to providing business reasons, I introduce other people who have adopted the new way of working. This helps mute “we’ve always done this way” resistance. And what is the goal of this change agent’s training and consultancy? Greater readability and usability in government and administrative documents.

Advent marks the period of waiting for Christmas; it’s also the beginning of the Christian liturgical year. The root of “advent” is the Latin adventus ‘a coming, arrival’. The custom of the Advent calendar originated in Germany, but the word “calendar” is based on the Latin calendarium, which is derived from calendae meaning the first day of the month. The Hosanna hymn Finns sing on the first Advent was composed by Georg Joseph Vogler in Germany in the late 1700s. The key word is derived from the Hebrew wordhoshana ’save’ which appears often in the Old Testament. The four weeks of Advent lead to joulun juhla, Finnish for ‘the celebration of Christmas.’ Both of our words come from the same Germanic root, which is also the source of the English word yule. Germany has also contributed to traditional Nordic Christmastime catering, with glogg, a hot spiced alcoholic punch, and “peppercakes”, English gingerbread cookies. I wish everyone an enjoyable Christmas!

During the Applied Linguistics Symposium, I followed a colloquium, or ‘scientific discussion,’ by researchers from Turku University dealing with advertising rhetoric. In his opening presentation, Ville Virsu illustrated how important the word “authentic” is in commercials. Authenticity is expressed by telling about raw materials, manufacture, history, birth place and the product’s “naturalness”. Paradoxically, authenticity is a selling point for travel agencies, which are focused on mass tourism. Laura Puromies has examined sauna stoves: in the 1950s, marketers emphasized internationality; in the 1960s, technology; in the 70s, relaxation; in the 80s, humor; in the 90s, atmosphere; and around 2000… authenticity. Maiju Kannisto said in her presentation that the MTV3 channel sells programs to advertisers with adjectives like new, efficient, and affordable; new can refer to recent, innovative or inexperienced. Two presentations examined social media as an advertising channel: Maria Eronen-Valli introduced Starbucks’ way of crowdsourcing, and Lotta Lehti analyzed Kesko’s attempted Twitter campaign, in which nearly all the contributions were from Kesko’s own staff. The research project is still in its early stages, but it’s already made explicit the rhetoric and the background mechanisms of advertising.

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?