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

Writing: More specific is better until it’s not

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Investment commentary writers often struggle to make their writing more concise. Sometimes being more precise helps.

How to do it

Here’s a before-and-after example:

BEFORE: Value stocks outperformed growth stocks in the last month of the quarter.

AFTER: Value stocks outperformed growth stocks in June.

See the difference? I find many examples like this when I compile and edit fund performance commentary for my asset management clients.

The flip side

On the other hand, commentary writers sometimes go overboard with specificity. One of my pet peeves is excessive references to the quarter under discussion.

If you name the quarter in the beginning of your paragraph, and you don’t change periods, there’s no need to repeat “the third quarter” in every sentence. The repetition is boring. It also uses up space that could be spent on meaningful discussion of the drivers of performance.

What do YOU suggest?

You’ve probably read investment commentary that could benefit from greater specificity. What are your suggestions in this area?

Maintain your draft’s momentum with these tips

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If you’re too busy to complete a draft in one sitting, these tips can help.

When you return to a partly written draft, you may feel as if you’re starting from scratch again. You have lost your momentum because you have no idea what comes next. You can beat this “blank page” feeling by leaving yourself some hints for your next words.

Here are some techniques you can use:

1. Stop after you write the first sentence of your next paragraph. If it is an effective topic sentence, the rest of the paragraph should flow easily.

2. Jot down bullet points outlining what you’ll write after you return. It’s easier to turn bullets into sentences than to pull ideas out of your head in an organized manner.

3. Pull out your mind map, outline, or other notes. If you organized your ideas in writing before you started your draft, you can pull out your notes to ease you back into your draft. For me, this usually means looking at a hand-drawn mind map. You might prefer an outline or some other form of reminder.

YOUR tips?

I’m sure some of you have discovered other tips that make it easy to dive into your incomplete drafts. Please share.

Image courtesy of Zuzzuillo / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Stars aren’t only for Morningstar: How to cut your draft

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Sometimes you have to limit yourself to a specific number of words when you write. This is often true when you write for someone else’s print or online publication. If your draft runs too long, and you have trouble cutting, consider starring your content as Roy Peter  Clark suggests in Help! for Writers in his chapter on “Making it Better.”

Rate each section of your content, considering its importance and interest to your readers. “Strongest sections earn a grade of three stars; the next get two; and the weakest get one star,” says Clark.

Start your cutting with the one-star sections. Depending on how many words you need to lose, you may achieve your goal by eliminating a word here and a sentence there from your one-star sections.

On the other hand, if your piece is way too long, you may need to delete all of your one-star material and start hacking at your two-star material.

Does this approach seem helpful to you? I haven’t used it because I usually cut based on what my gut tells me to do. Still, I can see how it might help writers without this instinct.

Image courtesy of Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

May 2013 presentations: Boost the effectiveness of your writing

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Susan Weiner, ProfNet, #ConnectChat

If you’d like to boost the effectiveness of your financial writing, consider attending one of my May 2013 events in Hartford, Conn., New York City, or Norwood, Mass.

“How to Write Investment Commentary People Will Read” in Hartford, Conn., and New York City

  •  I will speak to the CFA Society Hartford on May 2. This is a classic presentation that I’ve delivered to CFA societies across the U.S. and Canada. The lunch meeting runs from 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Hartford Club. Please register in advance.

 

“Writing Emails and Letters People Will Read”

On May 16 I’ll present “Writing Emails and Letters People Will Read” to the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts. It’s part of the association’s all-day annual meeting. You can register online for this event.

“The Four Secrets of Must-Read Communications”

I’ll present “The Four Secrets of Must-Read Communications,” an interactive program on investment-related communications at the PAICR RFP Symposium in New York City on May 20.  

Mistake Monday

To improve your proofreading skills, be sure to “like” the Investment Writing Facebook page and visit on Mistake Mondays. It’ll raise your awareness of common mistakes that we all make. You’ll also find links focusing on blogging, writing, and marketing.

Yes, that’s really my photo on a Times Square billboard

At 3 p.m. on March 5, I was the featured guest on ProfNet’s #ConnectChat Twitter chat moderated by Maria Perez (@ProfNet). I tweeted for journalists who’d like to shift into corporate writing. One cool thing was that my picture was posted in the Reuters billboard in Times Square as part of the chat promotion (see photo above). My recent Twitter chat for journalists trying to break into the corporate market was summarized on the ProfNet blog.