Mix up your style with this writing exercise
Could tweaking your style make your articles, blog posts, and white papers more effective? Try the writing exercise I describe below. The results may surprise you. In Stylish Academic Writing, author Helen Sword proposes a writing exercise in which you first evaluate something you’ve written in terms of the chart below. In other words: […]
Be specific about your advantages, or lose prospects
It’s hard to stand out among financial firms offering similar services and products. That’s why I agree that you should be specific about your advantages, as suggested by Marie Perruchet in One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business—or Yourself. Learn and share your differentiators. Perruchet says: A key differentiator should be […]
Keep on clicking links, or make unhappy discoveries later
Do you ever get tired of clicking links in your online and emailed publications to make sure they go to the right place? I do. It’s frustrating to click, click, click because 999 times out of 1,000 the link goes to the right place, and I see what I expect to see there. But what […]
Writing tip: being too precise can bloat your writing
Don’t write in a way that’s too precise. It’ll make your prose unnecessarily long. Example of being too precise My husband reminded me of this when proofreading my December e-newsletter. I had written “As the end of 2016 nears.” He changed it to “As 2016 ends.” Good call, dear hubby! I’d been concerned that December […]
Financial call transcripts: Are they good for marketing?
In my last staff job for an investment manager, I ran a weekly conference call with portfolio managers and other investment experts. Relationship managers and other portfolio managers dialed in to hear our experts’ views on the market and specific asset classes. My experience with those calls prejudiced me against using financial call transcripts for […]