Klart myndighetsspråk – ett handlingsprogram

Resumé

In 2013, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture appointed a work group to draw up an action programme for improving the authorities’ use of language. The group’s assignment was to propose methods and tools that would make the language of the authorities clear, understandable and matter-of-fact. The aim is for this requirement of the Administrative Procedures Act to be better implemented than before. The main theme of the work group’s proposals was that clarity, intelligibility and matter-offactness in public administration language forms a cornerstone of a democratic society. Data for the project was gathered by collecting the experiences of the authorities, translators, language advisers and citizens. The finished action programme was handed over to the Ministry of Education in 2014. The programme aims to shift the attention from single texts and formulations to the prerequisites and conditions for writing well. It is important that the authorities are aware of how much officials work with language, in writing or handling texts. The highest decision-making bodies, the managements of government agencies and each individual employee are jointly responsible for language quality, and that is why the programme contains measures for all these levels. Once the programme is completed it will also be necessary to market the recommendations of the programme, and inform the authorities of the benefits reaped from following the recommendations.