Finding your article’s focus with Roy Peter Clark

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Identifying their focus is one of the biggest challenges for many of my blogging class students. I try to help them by asking “What problem do you solve for your readers?” I found additional helpful techniques in the “I don’t know what my story is really about” chapter of Roy Peter Clark’s Help! for Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces. I discuss some of them in this post.

1. “Write a six-word theme statement.”

If your idea requires more than six words, it may be too big. A six-word theme may still be too broad. For example, consider “More women than men reach ninety,” one of Clark’s sample themes. However, at least it provides a starting point.

My theme for this blog post is “Tips to focus your articles.”

There are two ways to use your theme. First, as inspiration for your article. Write to explain your theme.

Second, use it to narrow your article. Pare away anything that doesn’t relate to your theme.

2. “Cut the elements least supportive of your focus.”

Use your best material and lose the rest. As Clark says,

Not all evidence is equal. If you can identify the weakest evidence, what is left—your strongest stuff—can support a sharp focus.

The saying “less is more” often applies to articles, blog posts, and more. By deleting flabby evidence, you sharpen your main focus.

Clark lists eight characteristics that make evidence weak. Two of them often apply to financial pieces.

  1. “It will appear in the story only because of your interest in it.”
  2. “It is impossible to write it clearly and quickly for a general audience.”
The next time you read a poorly written post, ask yourself if it suffers from #1 or #2.
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3. Use the funnel

Putting your ideas through a metaphorical funnel may also help. As Clark suggests on his book’s back cover:

See your work in the form of a funnel. You pour everything in at the top, but as the funnel narrows, you must become more selective, reaching a point where you can leave things out with confidence.

Alternatively, think of yourself as a sculptor with a block of marble. Only by cutting away stone can you reveal your masterpiece.

How do YOU find your focus?

There are many ways to identify the focus of an article, blog post, or other written communication. What’s your favorite technique?

 

 

The “Be” test for writers

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“To be or not to be” is one of the most famous phrases in the English language, thanks to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Despite that line’s power, forms of “be” often indicate weak writing.

To raise the impact of your writing, go on a search-and-destroy mission for forms of “to be.”

For example, change “Our firm is using an algorithm” to “Our firm uses an algorithm.” As this example suggests, searching for “ing” will highlight text that will benefit from edits.

 

Image courtesy of Dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

Quantitative easing for regular folks: 3 lessons from The New York Times

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“Quantitative easing” pops up regularly in economic and market commentary. The term conveys a lot to financial professionals who know the fine points of QE3 vs. QE1. However, it’s likely to make the average American say, “Huh?”

This is why I suggest that you learn from newspapers when you discuss quantitative easing—or other technical terms—in your communications aimed at ordinary folks. I found three techniques in recent articles.

Technique 1: Avoid the topic entirely

Sometimes newspapers avoid the topic entirely, even when it’s relevant. For an example of this, see “U.S. Economy Grew 1.7% During the 2nd Quarter, Topping Forecasts” in The New York Times, which simply refers to the Fed’s “huge stimulus efforts,” which, of course, include more than just quantitative easing. You should consider this technique, too, if the details of the Fed’s bond purchases aren’t important to your discussion.

Technique 2: Discuss the topic, but skip the technical term

Another technique is to describe quantitative easing in general terms, as in the following New York Times headline: “Bond Purchases by Fed Will Continue, at Least for Another Month.” The article described the Fed’s adding “$85 billion a month to its holdings of mortgage-backed securities and Treasury securities.”

Other references in the article included:

  • “Asset purchase program”
  • “Monthly asset purchases”
  • “Bond-buying program”

In many cases, these descriptions provide enough detail for your readers.

Technique 3: Use the term, but explain it

The term “quantitative easing” didn’t surface until close to the end of the Times‘ “Bond Purchases” article, with the following sentence:

Other economists, including Lawrence H. Summers, a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Bernanke, have expressed similar concerns about the purchases, which go under the label “quantitative easing.”

Because the article had described the purchases earlier, it didn’t explain them in detail in the sentence above. If this sentence were the article’s first reference, the author could have included an explanation something like the following:

quantitative easing, the Fed’s purchase of long-term bonds to help stimulate the economy by lowering long-term interest rates

What’s right for you?

Ask yourself whether your readers need to see the term “quantitative easing.” Perhaps it’s enough for them to be aware of “the Fed’s bond-buying program.

If you’re writing for a mixed audience of regular folks and investment professionals, you may choose to use “quantitative easing.” However, I suggest in that case that you define it on first use and put the term in context, as I did in my discussion of “Technique 3.”

What’s YOUR approach?

Do you use “quantitative easing” everywhere, avoid it entirely, or mix it up?

Need hands-on help with your commentary?

I can write your commentary based on interviews with your investment professionals or based on attribution analysis and other materials provided by you. I also edit commentary you’ve written to make it more compelling and reader-friendly.

If your budget is limited, hire me to evaluate your newsletter and suggest improvements that you can implement yourself.

Dear husband, please stop

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You can learn a writing lesson from my dear husband.

It drives me crazy when he says to a restaurant’s hostess, “You don’t have a table for two, do you?”

I nag him afterwards, saying “Ask a positive question, not a negative one! It’s easier for the listener to understand what you want.”

The “go positive, not negative” rule applies to statements as well as questions.

Here’s an example of a negative statement that sticks in my mind due to my having earned a Ph.D. in Japanese history.

“The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage…”

This is how the Japanese emperor announced in 1945 that Japan had lost the war. Did you understand that?

The Japanese prefer roundabout sentences. Americans do not.

Keep it short, but mix it up

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Short sentences are easier to read. But many of us learned to write long sentences in what Natalie Canavor, author of Business Writing in the Digital Age, calls “pre-20th century writing.” The best writing mixes sentence lengths for variety, rhythm, and better comprehension.

Modern and historical sentence lengths

Canavor lists the following sentence lengths in her book:

  • 7-10 words for spoken sentences
  • 14-22 words, on average, for the most understandable written sentences
  • 23 words in the late 19th century
  • 29 words in Victorian times
  • 45 words in Elizabethan times
  • 50 words in pre-Elizabethan times

Sentences are getting shorter. As they shrink, so does readers’ patience with long-winded writing.

Variety is good, too

Short is good, but line after line of short sentences may bore your readers.

I agree with Canavor’s advice to keep your sentences short on average. In an example she cites in her book, the sentence length of several paragraphs averages 17.9 words. However, “one sentence is 41 words long and a few are less than 10 words.” This can work if the long sentence is properly crafted.

Test your writing

How long do YOUR sentences run? Take something you’ve written recently and calculate the average sentence length. It’s easy to do in Microsoft Word using its readability statistics. Other word-processing software offers similar capabilities.

By the way, the average sentence length in this blog post is 11.5 words.

Good book for novice business writers

I like Business Writing in the Digital Age as a resource for novice business writers. It has lots of practical tips, examples, and writing exercises.

Margin analysis to improve your writing

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Like belongs with like in your writing, as I discussed in “Key lesson for investment commentary writers from my professional organizer.” In Help! for Writers, Roy Peter Clark suggests a way that you can analyze and then reorganize your drafts so that your information goes in the right places.

Step 1: Print and write in margins

Print your draft on paper and then list in the margin the main topics of each paragraph. This helps you to get some distance from your draft so you can analyze it.

Step 2: List most important topics

On a separate piece of paper, list your draft’s most important topics. Assign each topic a color. Use colors of markers that you have handy or of highlighter colors in your word-processing program.

Next, color each section or paragraph according to its topic. If you see one color scattered throughout your draft, you can assess whether to leave it that way or, as Clark says, “bring those elements together in a single coherent passage.”

If you try this technique, I’d like to hear from you about how it works for you.

 

Note: On July 2, I added a clarifying phrase to this post.

Top writing tips from CFA Hartford, FPAMA, NYSSA, and PAICR

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Participants in my four May writing workshops expressed their opinions on my most helpful tips. I share their favorites below, along with related links.

1. Use mind mapping to organize your thoughts before you write.

You can create a mind map focused on the topic you’d like to tackle in your investment commentary, article, or other written piece. Put the topic in the middle of your page, then start mapping ideas. Once you have everything down on the page, it’s time for analysis. Don’t forget this key step!

Here are some of my blog posts on mind mapping:

Mind mapping was the favorite tip of my CFA Hartford and New York Society of Security Analysts participants.

2. Use the first-sentence check on your articles, blog posts, and more.

The first-sentence check is a great way to assess how well your article flows. The method also gives you a sense of how much a skimming reader might absorb.

The basic idea is to read the first sentence of every paragraph. I explain the details in “Quick check for writers, with an economic commentary example.”

This was the favorite tip of participants in my PAICR RFP Symposium presentation. In general, they favored my tips for simplifying sentences. By the way, if you’re a PAICR member, you can find my handout from the presentation on the members-only website.

3. Improve your email subject lines.

Your email subject lines will have a greater impact when you put your action items and deadlines in them. Also, pay attention to line length, or you may experience the problem I describe in “Don’t make this mistake in your email subject lines!”

The topic of subject lines clearly resonated with the attendees at my presentation to the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts.

 

Want to learn more about these techniques? Stay tuned for the release of my book, Financial Blogging: How to Write Powerful Posts That Attract Clients.

June 28 update: I revised this post to add a link to “Photo + Mind Map = Blog Inspiration,” which is one of my favorite posts. Also, I made one small word change.

Simplify and clarify to write better

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how to not write bad ben yagoda“The road to not writing badly starts with simplifying and clarifying,” wrote Ben Yagoda in “In Writing, First Do No Harm.” Yagoda is the author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and How to Avoid Them.

Here are some steps you can take to apply Yagoda’s advice to your writing:

  1. Use the first-sentence check method to make sure your article flows logically.
  2. Ask yourself if every sentence of every paragraph supports the paragraph’s topic sentence.
  3. Shorten your sentences.
  4. Delete excess words.
  5. Replace jargon with plain English.
  6. Test your writing on a member of your target audience.

 

Don’t write like a spiny cedar!

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The triangular spikes that studded the tree’s bark caught my eye along the Costa Rican trail. They’re the spiny cedar’s protection against sloths who would scale it. When you write, please don’t put spikes on your text. They’ll turn away the time-pressed readers who are your sloths.

What are the spikes in your writing?

In many cases, the spikes in advisors’ writing are ten-dollar words: fancy-schmancy jargon or Latinate words that could easily be replaced by plain English.

For example, I’ve long disliked the word “mitigate,” as I wrote in “Can you make a case for mitigate?” “Financial writers clinic: Getting rid of ‘mitigate,'” and “BNY Mellon: I liked your ‘truth ad’ until you used that word.”

By the way, if you’d like to see a genuine spiny cedar, my husband and I took this photo on the Teak and Canal trail of Hacienda Baru on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast.

Another reason to proofread: Broker example

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When your letters include typos, you confuse your readers and undercut your image as a professional. One of my Weekly Tip readers shared the following story about some terrible typos. I’d like to credit him, but he told me that he “must remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the media.”

Can you guess the words that the letter’s author was trying to write?

I recall my first sales manager calling a meeting to address a new broker trainee’s remarkable letter to a prospective client. The correspondence highlighted the firm’s extraordinary capabilities in the stick, sock, and bind markets, at various points in the letter.

It was a real letter submitted to a manager for compliance review in a branch out in the hinterlands, and had been photocopied so many times it was almost blurry. Apparently, it was an effective tool for getting the point across to new hires, used by many a manager in the branch system.

 

 

If you have a great communications story you’d like to share, please send it along or share in the Comments below.

Image courtesy of Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net