During the papal conclave, a radio journalist asked me the origin of the expression “cardinal error”. I would have liked to tell a colorful tale about an insidious prince of the church who turned the course of history by selecting the wrong pope. Sadly, word origins rarely offer such entertaining stories. In this case, the dictionary says that the adjective cardinal means ‘principal, fundamental, chief, very serious, grave’. The Finnish kardinaali isn’t widely used in a non-ecclesiastical sense; our dictionary mentions cardinal error, cardinal numbers, cardinal bird, and cardinalfish. In English, cardinalappears as an adjective much more often: cardinal principle gets 179 000Google hits, cardinal rule has 688 000 hits, and cardinal direction26 300 000. All cardinals have Latin roots; remaining unaware of thoseorigins could be a cardinal sin.

The Editor’s Book is worth checking out if your job includes editing or you just simply like a book as an artifact. It is a good example of a quality book, both visually and in terms of content. The appearance is harmonious and perfectly meets the requirements for book typography that Markus Itkonenspells out in one of the book’s selections. As for the contents, the book consists of twenty cogent articles that deal with publishing, book-editing, the book as artifact, and marketing. A large appendix presents sample contracts, proofreading marks, and an editor’s checklist. The book’s editor,Teijo Makkonen, says that there’s no formal training program for book editors; the work has to be learned on the job. The core competence is deciding what to publish, declares Harri Haanpää. According to him, the decision is based on the ability to distinguish the significant from the insignificant; rejection is an essential skill, since that’s what the editor does 99.5% of the time. Authors often forget that publishing is a business, and that a book is the product. Arto Tuokko calculates that in Finland a book has to sell two thousand copies before the publisher breaks even − and most books don’t come near that. That’s why Timo Salo suggests that editors add another category to their bedtime reading: sales figures.

A few weeks ago, I finished my language criticism course for journalism students. In all, they submitted 83 stories, totaling 21,871 words—and 181,504 characters. They did well with grammar, and even with comma usage I only found 59 errors. Most of those had to do with the Finnish rules about when to use a comma with “and”. Most of my criticisms dealt with redundancy: repetition (60), unnecessary words (44), and wordy expressions (39). I noted 55 cases of using inappropriate words, but I found many more opportunities to praise excellent choices. To translate some examples into English, students used “needle” instead of the more obvious “tease;” critics were “niggling” rather than “picky.” I also found vivid new expressions like “attitude factory” for a school producing like-minded students, “hikikomori,” and “baking wizard” in a piece about a creative grandmother. In sum, the students showed great awareness of language. They knew their own weaknesses and worked to avoid them, and they really wanted detailed feedback on their language. Not only did they make effective choices, but they could also defend why they wrote as they did. It was nice—I mean, invigorating—to work with such language champs.

In Saturday’s Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, Ville Blåfield compared two political cultures through speeches by two presidents, Sauli Niinistö of Finland and Barack Obama. Citing Antti Mustakallio and Jussi Lähde, he states that Niinistö uses a highly formal style laden with Finnish officialese. Niinistö presents issues abstractly and impersonally, while Obama frequently uses “I” and “me”. Why do Finnish politicians think they have to hide themselves? The former MP Rosa Meriläinen writes in The Researcher’s Book that in Finland politicians imitate the style of experts, because we Finns have very rigid ideas about the speaking style that a politician should use. In order to be credible, a politician must not only speak like a technocrat but also mask his intentions with a coating of facts and neutral language. This kind of rhetorical posing should not, however, add to someone’s apparent trustworthiness. Instead, credibility comes from openly stating what you think and what you propose to do.

I bought The Researcher’s Book at the book fair and read it last week. This collection of 26 articles reveals the work life of a researcher organized around three themes. The contributors are researchers at different career stages from doctoral student to emeritus professor. The book works well: it opens the tacit knowledge of the field to the reader in ways that are fascinating – and sometimes sarcastic. In the article by Joel Kuortti andTapio Rissanen, working conditions on the typical short-term research project are described with the expression ‘Japanese strike’: researchers do more and more work, because they’re never sure how much is enough.Anneli Anttonen and Jorma Sipilä temper the novice researcher’s enthusiasm to conquer the world by saying that bold initiatives are not well received in the strenuously conservative scientific world . An article is more likely to be published if it brings a little clarification to an issue that has been recently discussed in academic journals. According to Pirjo Nikander, a conference paper is likelier to be accepted when the title sounds interesting but not too clever; it’s also wise to embed in the title some words related to the conference themes. The Researcher’s Book also suggests that scientific writing is undergoing changes. For example, it now includes candid descriptions of the actual research process, and the writer is no longer completely hidden by facts and neutral phrasing.

Last week, the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper released a great tool for making your own bullshit bingo. This online resource even lets you add terms to bingo cards for fields like media, IT, government, and business in general. Clearly we also need a card for project management. If I were making one, I’d start with these terms: project methodology, development program, coordinator, objective, implementation, developing performance, development know-how, engagement model, best practices, network of experts, project application, resources, functioning pattern, deliverable, operating environment, peer community. Projects aim to do something in real life; that’s why they should describe their actions concretely, not vaguely. Managers justify such murky project language by saying it simply fulfills the sponsor’s requirements. Similarly, sponsors supposedly require the abbreviation of the project’s name, which explains freakish labels like VeTeVT, eEtu, PEPPIII, JoPe. If I were a sponsor, I would urge plain language instead of obscure project-management jargon.

At the end of January, I was one of 150 participants in a conference on online community management at the Hotel Rosendahl in Tampere. Keynote speaker Antti Isokangas believes that all media are becoming more and more social, and content sharing by media professionals is increasing as well. According to him, topics first arise on TV and in newspapers; only later are they discussed in social media. My experience is just the opposite: increasingly, topics first appear on social media; traditional media report on the topic after a few hours or days, often without mentioning their social-media sources. This trend seems to get stronger all the time. From a company perspective, Marko Suomi and Janne Ruohisto wonder how to get employees to use the available social tools. One answer was provided by Pirjo Friedrich, who presented F-Secure’s crowdsourced project, carried out on the Owela platform. They encouraged volunteers by making weekly assignments, sending email updates, and rewarding participation – that is to say, in the same way as in online instruction. Of course, the assignments need to be interesting and have a personal touch, otherwise people won’t participate.

A customer complaint is a genuine opportunity for a company, because it offers the chance to improve service or eliminate a deficiency. Gigantti, the Finnish electronics company, clearly has room for improving how it handles complaints like the one I sent to their customer support people. I had ordered a computer by phone for pickup at a store. Although my order was confirmed during the call and by email , when I drove the 20 kilometers to the store, I discovered they didn’t have the computer. Another store did have it, but the salesman said that only the department manager could arrange for transfer to this store—and he was on vacation. In my complaint, I asked whether in the online age Gigantti truly needed the manager’s involvement, with its one-week delay, in order to complete a sale. In their reply, they said they would…pass my complaint along. When I checked again two weeks later, their email reply said that they regretted the delay—and told me that my complaint had again been forwarded to someone. Then I got an e-mail from yet another Gigantti person, who was clearly starting from square one. I sent him the entire correspondence. Yesterday, 23 days after I placed the order, I got a message that the computer was available at the store. “We hope this will satisfy you.” Alas, this hope is in vain. To seize the opportunity that a complaint offers, you need to act quickly, respond coherently, and address the customer’s concerns. And you need to cut out slow, unhelpful processes.

Last week there was a fierce online discussion about publishing open textbooks. Why is the topic so emotional? Open-access publishing can be viewed from at least two perspectives; having written both commercial and open-learning material, I’m familiar with both. As an active member in the association of Finnish nonfiction writers, I know that many of our members earn their living by writing, and some teachers have become full-time textbook writers. Nonfiction writing is a profession just like journalism, and the work should support the worker. On the other hand writers and teachers are free to do volunteer work, and even donate their royalties to charity. My experience is that commercial textbooks are more polished than open materials composed by teams of volunteers because traditional publishers can help with layout, editing, and similar tasks. Even so, the open-produced material can be good enough for the user’s needs in the same way as Wikipedia or online dictionaries. An elegant example of the new approach is the recent campaign in which researchers freely publish their scientific articles online in honor of the late open access activist Aaron Swartz.

This week I’ve started teaching an interesting new course: language criticism for journalism students. Students edit a weekly magazine, Utain, and receive critiques of their stories. Often in other courses people like to harshly criticize the language used by journalists. I regularly defend the language of newspaper journalists as well as radio and TV broadcasters, because I think their language is surprisingly well-controlled considering how much they write and speak. The first batch of stories I reviewed confirmed my positive view, because the examples were well thought out and almost error-free. The pattern of the errors also highlights the good language skills of these writers: compound words and capitalization, zero errors; pronouns, 2; numbers, 2; punctuation errors, 6. Most of my critiques dealt with word choice and with verbosity, and these are topics for discussion rather than actual mistakes.