At the Finnish Consulting Group Forum last week, the Language Police presented the Top Ten List for bureaucratic jargon, and attendees chose the most outstanding example. This year, we were especially interested in nominations for complicated organizational names and lumbering titles. Among the striking examples were documents related to projects for the European Union. In fact, two of those made it to the final round. Not that surprising, since for bodies like the EU, ERDF, and ESF, applications for project funding are submitted through the project funding application. In a similar vein, wordy exactitude triumphed over clarity in an explanation that the Ella Project is a part of the Kasperi II Project / the developmental project for Mid-Finland’s families with children. That slash is particularly outstanding.

Among the main features of the finalists are repetition, awkward names, difficult abbreviations, and long strings of adjectives. They also show a lack of vocabulary, demonstrated by the overuse of words like development and activity. The winning entry was the introduction to projects undertaken by Suupohja’s Municipal Federation for Basic Services and Public Utilities, whose very name deserves an award; the introduction includes not only names and acronyms for participating jurisdictions but the full names of projects. Who would not want to read The Final Report of the Selevä Paletti Development Project, a Component of the KASPER Project, Part of the Central Finland Children, Youth and Families KASTE Suite?

My thanks to everyone who submitted a nominee and to the forum participants who selected the winner. As always, the real winner will be the ongoing campaign against jargon-laden bureaucratic writing. Long live clear language!

The newest Lööppi & Skuuppi magazine has an interview with researcher Maria Lassila-Merisalo, where she gives strict advice to writers of online articles. Her instructions caused a tempest in Twitter’s teacup, because they greatly differed from accepted views. The researcher considers links, as well as the option to comment, useless, because links will expire and comments require moderation. However, her most surprising opinion was her disdain for subheads: “Subheadings are not worth including, although they are still recommended by some sources. Surprisingly, according to surveys, people don’t even read them.” This advice runs contrary to, for example, Jakob Nielsen’s usability studies, and I have neither found for myself nor read in the interview any convincing evidence to support her claim. Further, Lassila-Merialo’s guidelines are based on a specific online format: a long narrative article which is intended to be read from start to finish. However, most online texts are meant for information search and therefore benefit from subheadings which speed up skimming. Thus, in my teaching, I will continue to emphasize their crucial contribution to online usability, at least until better arguments appear.

My week in Japan gave me a taste of what it would be like to live as an illiterate in a foreign country. You don’t understand directions or guidelines, and even in tourist spots, service personnel seem to vanish after noticing a foreign customer. On the other hand, the nonverbal communication was extremely polite; even train conductors turned twice to bow before exiting the carriage. In the Japan Times, I read that the Japanese language expresses respect and courtesy in many ways: through inflection, word choice, and sentence structures. For example, status and relationship affect verb selection, and the extremely formal keigo business language has a wide range of phrases to exalt others and humble yourself. Both Finnish and English have borrowed many words from Japanese: aikido, bonsai, emoji, futon, judo, haiku, karaoke, karate, kimono, manga, origami, rickshaw, sake, satsuma, shiitake, sudoku, sumo, sushi, tsunami. However, a tourist-san won’t get far in everyday situations with only this vocabulary.

The approach of summer brings warmer weather, longer days, and the 2015 edition of the Jargon Contest. This year, we’re especially interested in bloated or baffling names for departments or agencies, though you can also submit an outstandingly bad sentence or short passage from a governmental or private-sector source. From the nominees, we’ll select three finalists, and on June 4th, at the Finnish Consulting Group’s annual forum, participants will vote on the winner. If your nomination becomes a finalist, you’ll earn bragging rights as well as a copy (in Finnish) of The Top 10 List from the Language Police. Because the real goal of the Jargon Contest is to encourage clear writing and not to ridicule, we won’t publish the name of the original author, and you can remain anonymous if you wish. Do your part to discourage officious, obtuse, or onerous writing: send your nomination via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail at info@yksityinenkielitoimisto.net. The deadline is May 30th.

What does a social media campaign look like on Twitter? The formula consists of three phases. Coming soon: A fabulous event. Today: We’re having a fabulous event (with selfies). Tomorrow: We had a fabulous event yesterday. I would prefer to make my own conclusions about how fabulous the event is, based on the content of messages and not on their number. Three similar phases apply to the Twitter campaigns of political candidates: Vote for Maija Meikäläinen. Retweets of “I’m voting for Meikäläinen” messages, with selfies. Post-election, a thank you from @VoteForMaija, after which the account falls silent. Is this bad? Not if between the three phases the candidate shares other content and conversations. However, if the stream is mere self-marketing, silence would be a less embarrassing alternative. A candidate does not need a separate Twitter campaign if she truly participates in social media between elections—her actions and views are open to continuous assessment. In fact, if support for the candidate comes mainly from party hacks tweeting “Maija is doing great,” it’s not a social media campaign; it’s just spam.

Last Saturday at Oulu University, Maija Saviniemi defended her dissertation entitled ”It’s Embarrassing if the Professionals Make Clumsy Grammar Mistakes”. The dissertation deals with the knowledge and practices of editorial staff concerning language planning, which is the deliberate effort to influence how language is used. Her research material is based on 232 responses to a questionnaire sent to Finnish newspapers and the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In newsrooms, major problems with usage often involve compounds and commas, and the most widely used language aid is the spelling checker. Local dialects and colloquialisms are acceptable in interviews and direct quotations, but for reporting the news, journalists stick to standard language. The attitude of the respondents is positive: 97 percent consider language planning important. Good language is necessary for quality writing and for successful interaction with readers. And speaking of language planning, when Saviniemi’s questionnaire asked how often respondents turned to language aids—often, fairly often, not often, and rarely—they asked what “often” meant.

I recently read three completely different social media guides in a row. While I did, I thought about how difficult it is to take an unconditional attitude towards guides in your own field. You’re constantly tempted to comment and criticize. So I decided to educate myself by picking up only positive things from the books.

The Twitter Book, by Tuomas Enbuske and Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb, with its laid-back, magazine-style voice, encourages readers to start tweeting. In my opinion, they have the right focus; Twitter frees public discussion from gatekeepers. “Freedom is more essential than ‘quality’ dictated from the top.”

Harto Pönkä’s Social Media Handbook emphasizes that social media is about connecting people, groups, and networks. Networking is more efficient on Twitter than on Facebook or LinkedIn, because of the potential to create one-way connections. Another key point is that the communal nature of networks depends on activity and duration—not the platform but the interaction.

Pekka Sauri, the deputy mayor of Helsinki, is the author of Public Administration and Social Media, which examines the topic from the point of view of city administration. The city’s central task, according to Sauri, is to combine the various interests of its inhabitants. Social media can consolidate urban intelligence into superbrains that can solve any problem. Participation succeeds only if the public administration is transparent, and it is made transparent through communication and interaction. Social media is a great tool for this, but officials must have the courage to change themselves from faceless authorities to human beings.

All three social media guides are available as electronic books. Reading them made me consider whether this format is making books a bit lighter and shorter. On the screen, it is in fact easy to skim through a hundred-page publication written with a newspaper-like style.

I led a week-long training session with the help of an interpreter. The audience’s understanding of English varied, and so the interpreter translated my words into Georgian. When you use a second language, your range of expression narrows because you lack all the nuances that your native language provides. And the translation of such non-native speech into a third language can reduce the power of expression further; even a skilled interpreter will inevitably change the meaning.

The trickiest issue, however, was creating interaction. Discussions become very slow when all the contributions have to be translated. I was also caught off balance when a funny story I told was met with silence—until the interpreter finished retelling it in Georgian, at which point people did laugh. This sort of delay hampers interaction, much like asking a question and not getting an answer till the following day.

Fortunately, the subject of my session was online tools and activities, which made it possible to create multi-lingual environments and foster interaction there. At the same time, my week clearly illustrates how essential a solid knowledge of English is, if you want access to global networks. When presenting MIT‘s open learning resources, the deputy director of the Georgian agency commented with wry humor: If we want to keep our jobs, we either have to stop teaching English, or stop teaching anything except English.

Last week I was consulting with the Academy of the Ministry of Finance in Georgia about the use of social media in education and in professional work. This assignment began by opening access to blogs, wikis, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. Last summer, Georgian ministries had closed access to such social media because they wanted to eliminate their use for entertainment during working hours. Facebook is the most popular service in Georgia, and the way it’s typically used has shaped attitudes toward the entire spectrum of tools. Participants repeatedly asked why they needed multiple channels like wikis, blogs, and Twitter; why can’t the same functionality come from a single service, namely Facebook. I myself use Facebook pages and groups professionally; I think these work well for relatively superficial discussion and sharing, such as agreeing on schedules. However, more complex work requires a wider range of tools, such as a blog for fuller reflection, or a wiki for building knowledge. When we combine such tools with a rapid reaction channel like Twitter, we create an effective social media environment for learning and for professional work. While Facebook has its strong points, it’s hard to weed out sheer entertainment because it was designed for just that purpose.

Authors earn their wages—and here in Finland, the average writer earns only a couple of thousand euros a year. However, even that amount can’t be deposited if nobody’s buying the books. In recent weeks, Pasi Jääskäläinen has drawn attention to the fact that in our small language area, there are too many writers and too few readers buying their work. He has decided to offer his highly-praised, often-translated books for free. Participants discussed this same topic last weekend during the non-fiction writer’s seminar at Arktikum. As the book industry continues to transform, authors need more than the ability to write. Because publishers provide visibility to only a few big names, other writers need to unlock the secrets of self-marketing. On my way home from the seminar, I asked the chair of the Finnish Book Publishers what he considered the most effective sales channel: trade fairs, speaking events, or e-commerce. According to him, there is no unambiguous answer. We have to actively seek new opportunities; the book must reach the right audience in the right place. Traditional methods for book sales aren’t enough; writers need to start a new chapter.