The Finnish ministry of education is encouraging the study of foreign languages as a way of building a “language reserve.” The idea that this will strengthen language abilities. Obviously, any type of international work will benefit from having second-language ability, but skill in your own language matters as well.

How well you use your language impacts your communication every day. When you’re writing reports, describing strategies, or simply composing memos in your own language, you can’t rely on your skill in another one. Nor can you assume your writing is effective just because it’s in your first language. Someone may be an expert in her field, but if her language skill is weak, it’s hard for other people to benefit from that expertise. It’s true that different situations call for different levels of skill, but there’s always a demand for some who can effectively use plain language.

A person who’s good at putting his native language to work contributes to the organization’s language reserve.

This week’s guest writer, Veera Louhivuori, is a Finnish language student who participated in the Language Consulting Course at the University of Tampere.

Last Friday, I received an author’s copy of Twitter viestintänä (Twitter as Communication). This is an anthology featuring 22 authors, with a topic of great interest to someone who’s Twitter-active.  I eagerly picked out some noteworthy points.

1) People active in Finnish politics and journalism form a particular virtual elite. Most journalists in this charmed group come from major media companies, while the politicians belong to the National Coalition Party and the Greens. (Iiri Ruoho’s & Jaana Kuusipalo’s article)

2) Direct contact between citizens and politicians increases confidence and promotes the healthy functioning of the system. 161 Finnish MPs – 80% of the total – are on Twitter, but there is only a small number of discussions, and even then, mainly with other representatives, not with ordinary citizens. (Mari Marttila)

3) Live tweeting during electoral discussions mostly deals with substance. The public hoped that politicians could keep their talks concrete and realistic. Tweets dealing with the personalities of the party leaders seem to reflect public opinion well. (Pekka Isotalus & Laura Paatelainen)

4) A hashtag launched by an organization can be hijacked by others. Businesses created hashtags for their branding and campaigning, but if the organization’s message is in conflict with user experience, people can and do harness the hashtag for negative communication. (Mia Virolainen & Vilma Luoma-aho)

5) In communication guidelines for Finnish cities, Twitter is linked to interacting with residents, but in practice it’s used for one-way messages. Twitter, however, fits public conversation well, and the interaction helps to turn government jargon into plain language. (My article)

6) Journalists use social media extensively to collect ideas, information and sources. The logic of mass media and the logic of social media are interlinked so that individual journalists apply the logic of social media, while media companies implement the logic of mass communication. (Janne Matikainen & Mikko Villi)

For more interesting Twitter information, read the book.

Twitter tells the user how many impressions their updates get. The numbers often run in thousands, even if there are few public reactions. Everyone wonders from time to time: does anybody read my tweets or do people just drop in to leave their own posts? So, last Saturday, I tweeted this as an experiment:

Quick Test: If you read this, please click the heart. Thanks for your help. 

During the first days, I checked the users who read my tweet, name by name. Initially, hearts came mainly from my followers, but later the proportion of non-followers grew. As the number of hearts increased, my tweet was seen by more people who weren’t following me. The total number of non-followers’ hearts accounted for about twenty percent.

I have 14,150 followers. My test tweet, according to Twitter’s own statistics, made 15,662 impressions. However, it received only 891 heart-clicks, less than 6 percent of impressions. If I omit the impressions of non-followers caused by an exceptional amount of likes, roughly 5 percent of my followers read and actually responded to the request to click. That’s not much of an impression.

”Liturgy” means the standard speech of public worship. In a figurative sense, liturgy often refers to approved ritual phrases. While attending a funeral last week, I thought of the religious language that I rarely encounter in my everyday life. In the specialized vocabulary of religion, there are many metaphors (streams of grace, bread of life), archaic expressions (thee, thou, tabernacle), unexpected word order (the Son of Man, the word of the Lord) and uncommon words (hallelujah, amen, atonement). A person’s attention tends to focus on the language and the manner of expression, while the actual message seems remote from our everyday life.

The challenges of the church’s special language are similar to those of the language used by government officials. The church’s phrasing is closely linked to the Bible; administration’s wording is tied to legal text. The status of both sources is so sacred that those who comply with them dare not deviate from accepted expression; instead, they follow past practice – literally. With everyday language, by contrast, the key message could relate more closely to the experience of the listeners, i.e. the word becomes flesh.

An out-of-the-box experience generally refers to how easy or difficult it is to start using a device right out of the package. Is the process simple and enjoyable?

I’ve extended this concept to public sector documents. How pleasant is it for an ordinary citizen to retrieve application forms, minutes and reports? What kind of background information do they require from the reader? Do the documents guide the reader’s action in the same way as new cellphones and computers do? According to my observations, government documents ignore the user’s perspective; they’re written to satisfy the agency’s needs and practices.

Officials and the work they oversee would profile from writing that reflects the citizen’s needs and intentions. Documents and forms should be self-explanatory and forms pre-populated, like on the Finnish tax returns. The documents help shape the user’s experience of the entire government, and that experience suggests whether administration is for citizens – or vice-versa.

Aphorisms stir up emotions. Some people see them as seemingly profound nonsense, while others gain strength from them. Whatever you think about aphorisms, two things are certain: on Facebook you can’t avoid them, and they represent an entire spectrum of language errors.

On that spectrum you can find:

• comma errors
• unnecessary  capitalization
• missing sentence parts, like verbs or subjects
• smilies instead of periods
• erroneous punctuation marks, usually in the wrong places
• confusing phrase structures
• over-long sentences.

Aphorisms are an art of everyday life, so we must allow them some liberty. But the artistic impression of an aphorism doesn’t suffer from having a comma in the right place. According to an aphorism, Martin Luther King said, “To serve, you don’t have to make your subject and verb agree. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.” When it comes to writing an understandable text, though, a loving soul is not enough and a gracious heart doesn’t help. A soul that can edit, on the other hand, is helpful if an aphorist wants his phrasing to produce feelings other than confusion.

This week’s guest writer, Terhi Savonen, is a Finnish language student who participated in the Language Consulting Course at the University of Tampere.

After a two year break, I attended the Online Educa Berlin conference. Three changes stand out: the number of Finns has decreased, the exhibitors seemed to be smaller players, and the event has become more interactive.

The absence of Finns may be due to the fact that there are not enough new topics for the top league, and for late adopters there is still enough to learn at home. Exhibitors, in turn, weigh the cost-benefit ratio; the Educa participant profile has probably changed so that vendors do not reach enough decision makers. For example, the only exhibitor from Finland was Tuudo.

In my opinion, adding interactivity is a good solution and reflects the state of online pedagogy. In the session I co-presented, our topics were related to communication: Vasilis Tsilivis called for Socratic dialogue and I spoke about the diversified utilization of social media in educational communication. This year’s presentations were shorter in duration, leaving more opportunity for public discussion. This is a great way to enliven a topic, but the obligation to engage in different learning cafés could also explain why we introvert Finns stay away.

Online Educa is still going strong. The 2017 event drew more than two thousand well-informed professionals from 80 countries. As a practical matter, I appreciate that it was again organized in the best German manner.

What are usernames like in Finnish online communities? Lasse Hämäläinen examined 7,600 usernames in three different communities. The most popular tend to reflect the user’s own first name, family name, or nickname (Jenni). Other popular choices are proper nouns (star wars-1), various descriptive words (coolboy9) and made-up names (htunaungh).

Often, the first username you choose is already taken. As a result, users customize that choice through modifications. Most commonly, they add numbers (Bella92), special characters (V!rtual), or additional letters (voldemortt). Other approaches involve changing or deleting some of the letters of the name. If the letters have been removed, deletion is most often done at the end of the word (DeacoMa). An extra space is sometimes added inside the word (Piz za), sometimes between parts of a compound word (jedi nite).

Only 40 percent of the usernames in Hämäläinen’s study began with a capital letter. The most popular languages were Finnish and English, but the third most popular, unexpectedly, was Japanese.

You hear a lot of opinions about discussions taking place in social media. Some people have even begun wondering whether social media can threaten democracy. But shouldn’t we make a distinction between various forums for discussion online?

The channel influences the quality of interaction. Susan C. Herring has categorized technical features and social situations that affect such discussion. Among other features, Herring mentions message length, anonymity, filtering, and media options. Situational factors include such things as the number of participants, their professions, the topic, and the objectives that participants have for their activity.

All these factors affect the quality of interaction, so it is quite a generalization to make negative statements about social media discussions without mentioning the forums on which the findings are based. Critics need to specify whether they‘re talking about discussions in blogs, wikis, learning environments, customer chats, public sector forums, or newspaper comment sections.

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.