How to add personality and warmth to your financial writing–Part two

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Personality and warmth help your readers connect with you. In part one of this post, we discussed using personal stories. In this post, I add four more techniques:

    1. Self-deprecating humor
    2. Analogies
    3. Distinctive language
    4. Quotations

 

1. Self-deprecating humor

Humor can be tricky because it can veer into the offensive. But gently poking fun at yourself is usually in good taste. It can also be disarming, as in the example below.

I like the following line written by Helen Lambiase, a student in my blogging class: “Keeping up consistently with a portfolio of individual stocks for the average individual investor is about as easy as sticking to a Weight Watchers diet (believe me, I can tell you about both.) ” Everyone in our class remarked on how friendly and approachable Helen sounded.

In another example, Bob Rall of Rall Capital Management titled his post “Are You Single?” and then wrote, “Before my wife reads that headline and thinks that I’m up to something that I shouldn’t be, I need to explain. If you are single, you have a different set of financial planning issues to deal with.”

A comedy-writing friend suggests that you use humor in moderation, or your shtick may become your identifying characteristic. If you recognize the name of Rodney Dangerfield, you know his most famous line is “I don’t get no respect.”

2. Analogies

Like flashlights, analogies illuminate murky areas. The analogies that you choose reflect your identity. For example, I’m unlikely to use sports, military, or science images. Gardening, travel, and books are more my speed.

3. Distinctive language

Write the way you speak, especially when you write blog posts. Everyday language makes you more approachable. (By the way, I originally wrote “colloquial language.”)

I’d love to see my client in Texas write blog posts that sound like his conversations. His colorful phrases, such as “drinking from a fire hose,” delight me.

I also like the following translation from a Chinese newspaper article, which I found in a Wall Street Journal article: “When the weasel pays a New Year’s visit to the chickens, nothing good will come of it.”

4. Quotations

If techniques 1-4 fail you, then find an evocative quotation to give a spark to an otherwise dry piece. The kind of person whom you quote can also reveal something about your personality. You’ll find plenty of quotation sources online, including the following:

As you do your daily reading, jot down great quotes in a notebook or electronic file. They may come in handy later.

How do YOU add personality and warmth?

I’m sure I’ve skipped some great techniques. Please share YOUR great ideas for adding personality and warmth to your writing.

 

Note: I updated this article on July 8 because I found my notes about that great weasel quote from “Chinese Media Open Cannon at U.S.” in The Wall Street Journal. Updated again on July 7 to correct a typo.

How to add personality and warmth to your financial writing–Part one

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Independent financial advisors find personality is a powerful marketing tool. It’s one thing that’s unique to you. However, it is not always easy to infuse your writing with personality.

In this two-part post, I address five tools you can use to address a personality gap in your writing, starting with personal stories.

1. Personal stories

Telling personal stories is an obvious way to give a flavor of your identity. It’s simplest if you’re an advisor who has grappled with many of the same financial issues as your clients. For example, you may have struggled with how much allowance to give your children. A story about how you reached your decision–or how you communicated it to your children–is a great kernel for a blog post, if you’re comfortable sharing.

Your personal story need not be directly related to a financial decision. I like how Jude Boudreaux of Upperline Financial writes about life lessons learned from his baby in “Baby Steps Aren’t Just for Babies.” Even non-parents like me can relate to a baby learning to walk. Jude takes pains to translate his little girl’s first steps into lessons for you, the reader, rather than focusing solely on himself and his family. He concludes by asking, “What baby steps can you take today to continue your growth as a person?”

Looking for inspiration?

Here are more examples of financial planners who share personal stories:

Still stumped? Father’s Day is coming up on June 17. Consider writing a post about “Lessons I learned from my father.” Be sure to include the implications for your readers. Give them a reason to care. If you write a Father’s Day post, please post a link in the Comments section. Thank you!

 

For more on this topic, please read the second part of this article.

 

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

 

5 Things to Stop Doing in 2016

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To improve your communications in 2016, I propose five things you should stop doing. If you’re making New Year’s resolutions, consider some of the items on my list to improve your relationships with clients, prospects, and referral sources.

1. Sending emails with missing or poorly written subject lines

For starters, never send an email with an empty subject line. People like me often delete those emails, assuming they’re spam. Another subject line “don’t”: keeping the same subject line even after the topic has changed.

If you’re writing to request an action, put that action in your subject line.

If your email is simply an FYI, say that in your subject line.

Whatever the purpose of your email, communicate that in your subject line.

For more on emails, see “Top four email mistakes to avoid when you’ve got a referral” and “4 reasons your emails don’t get results.”

2. Publishing or sending any written communication without proofreading at least once.

Example of typo that I'd like to eliminate as part of my New Year's resolutions

Sigh. I missed this typo.

Mistakes, especially stupid mistakes, make people wonder about your intelligence and attention to details.

Even writer geeks make mistakes. I am the poster child for that. I was so excited about finding a Strunk and White grammar rap video, that I posted it to my blog without proofreading my post. Oops! An obvious typo sneaked in.

3. Not blogging because you think your writing isn’t good enough

If you have a valid reason to blog, you can find a way to make it work. Keep your blog posts short. Use audio or video, if you’re more comfortable in those media. You can improve your blog post writing skills with my financial blogging class.

4. Avoiding social media

Social media isn’t going away. Dip your toes in the water. Get on LinkedIn and connect with as many people as possible, even if your Compliance Department limits your activity. You may be surprised by what you discover. Already on LinkedIn? Check out Twitter. Here’s how I built my Twitter following, which currently consists of more than 11,000 followers.

5. Ignoring your most common writing mistakes

You have lots of company if you’re making “Bloggers’ top two punctuation mistakes.” If you’ve moved beyond those mistakes, you may benefit from my favorite online resources for grammar, punctuation, and word usage help.

Thank you, Dorie Clark for inspiring this post!

Clark’s “5 Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012” is a good read. What are your New Year’s resolutions related to writing and communications?

This blog post was edited on June 11, 2012 to correct a typo and in Dec. 2015 to update the post, which was originally published in 2012, for 2016.
Image courtesy of Prakairoj/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Guest post: “Do Questions Make Good Titles?”

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Do Questions Make Good Titles?

By Ady Dewey

In finance-related writing, it seems that titles posing questions are popular. Scan the news, or bloggers’ posts, on any given day and you’ll find queries as headlines.

Is it an effective approach? It depends on the question. In my opinion, literal questions can be more successful than rhetorical ones. This is especially true if the article succinctly answers the question. Your question tells your audience exactly what will be covered, much like how a frequently asked question (FAQ) is formatted. It may draw readers who have that question in mind.

Questions that are rhetorical can mask the subject or be perceived as cynical. When the article does not address what readers expect, they may leave your page—or click to continue searching.

A question also needs to end in a question mark. However, if you are a writing a movie script, you may wish to reconsider this approach entirely as there’s a superstitious belief that films with a question mark in the title do poorly at the box office. This is why the punctuation is missing from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

So unless you’re writing a financial box-office hit, use questions for titles. They can be an effective hook to assure hits, generate interest, and draw in readers.

And there’s another use of questions as titles: ask yourself the question before you even begin to write. It can help you keep your prose or analysis succinct and focused on your audience’s needs.

 

Ady Dewey writes the blog PensionDialog covering issues in public pensions and retirement security. She is also an associate professor at the University of Maryland University College teaching communications.

Refresh your grammar and usage skills with Mistake Monday

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Test your editorial skills on Mistake Mondays! This weekly feature on the Investment Writing Facebook page displays samples of poorly written or inadequately proofread content for readers to critique.

Readers often come up with great suggestions for tweaking the content. You may find inspiration in their comments. At a minimum, you’ll receive a mini-refresher on how to write and edit well.

Here are some examples of items highlighted on Mistake Monday. If you can’t find the mistakes, maybe you should be reading the Mistake Monday posts.

 

 

 

Thank you, Mistake Monday commenters! You make Mistake Monday a fun learning experience.

 

P.S. I make some of these mistakes, too. It’s not easy proofreading oneself, especially in a time crunch.

P.P.S. Have a good example for Mistake Monday? Send it along!

Identifying “WHAT PROBLEM does this blog post solve for them?”

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“What problem do you solve for your clients?” Knowing what problem your blog post solves for your potential clients is one key to writing powerful blog posts.
This is typically one of the hardest questions for students in my blogging class to answer when they fill out their Blog Post Preparation Worksheet. If you fall into this group, it may help to imagine yourself in your readers’ shoes.

How would your target reader complete the following sentences?

  1. My problem is…and you’re going to solve it by…
  2. My problem is…and it’s keeping me from…
  3. I’m worried about…

Here’s my problem statement  for my blogging class for financial advisors:

My problem is that it takes too darned long−or it’s too hard−to write great blog posts. You−Susan−are going to solve my problem by showing me some techniques I can use to write faster and better.

Here’s a sample from the financial planning world, along with my rewrite:

1.    ORIGINAL: My problem is how to save for college.

2.    RE-WRITE: My problem is that I don’t know anything about how much my kids’ college education will cost and you can help me figure that out and also assess how best to save for it.

Does this help? Let me know if you have questions.

Reader challenge: Rewrite this sentence to improve it

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This sentence cries out for improvement. I’d like to know how YOU would fix it.

If you think this sentence is fine as is, you’re also welcome to comment.

We thought Best Buy was expensive; however, investors viewed online competitors as presenting a structural issue and Best Buy’s valuation declined dramatically during the year.

This sentence was copied from a mutual fund’s annual report.

Your personality can make any topic interesting

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“If you have chosen a topic that is of general concern, and if genuine feeling and intelligence come through, you will be interesting.”

-Thomas S. Kane
The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing, p. 5

This is good news for advisors who write about dry topics or topics that many others have covered. You can still stand out by letting your personality shine.

Here are a few ways you can do this:

  • Use distinctive language or images.
  • Write about one part of the topic that you feel strongly about.
  • Tell a story from your personal experience.

As Kane writes,

“Don’t be afraid to express your own opinions and feelings. You are a vital part of the subject. No matter what the topic, you are really writing about how you understand it, how you feel about it.”


How long should a blog post run?

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There’s no set rule. I typically target 250-400 words. That’s long enough to express one idea and short enough to discourage you from going off on tangents. I don’t like tangents in blog posts. Posts should be narrowly focused to make them easy for readers to absorb.

You’ll find opinions all over the place about blog post length. Most of you are busy, so I encourage you to keep your posts short to help you keep on a blogging schedule.

Let me know if you have questions!

“Reader-Friendly Reports” in a nutshell

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For a quick primer on writing great reports, simply read the following paragraph by Carter A. Daniel.

The people who assigned you the report did so because they didn’t have the time to do the work themselves. They asked you the questions, and now they want the answers. The answers, therefore, are the most important things in your report, and you must organize your whole report around those answers and wave them in your readers’ faces. State the answers at the beginning; elaborate on them one by one in the rest of the report; include only things that pertain to these answers; and be sure that the pertinence is always clear. Reread this paragraph.

If you can follow this advice, given by Daniel in Reader-Friendly Reports, p. 5, you can write a great report. If you need help, the author provides detailed instructions in the rest of the book.

Daniel’s sense of humor enlivens a book that might otherwise be dry. For example, he writes, “Footnotes don’t make something research. If you put footnotes on a piece of garbage, it’s still garbage,” (page 119).

He’s also practical; he doesn’t insist on esoteric practices for the sake of being “correct.” A realist about corporate life, Daniel says, “Nothing here is ‘correct’ if your boss told you to do it another way” (page 193).

The three key sections of this book are

  • Planning a Reader-Friendly Report—I agree with Daniel that planning is the most important step.
  • Writing a Reader-Friendly Report—I love the sub-sections about understandability, organized paragraphs, and strong sentences and clear style. The rest of this section overlaps with a good book about grammar, punctuation, and other usage questions.
  • Research Techniques—The myths and realities subsection is a “must read.”

In my opinion, the book would have been complete with just these three sections. However, the author also includes sections on “Other Things,” Sample Reports,” “The Appearance of the Finished Document,” and checklists. The good news? You can grasp the author’s most important points in just 147 pages.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from McGraw-Hill in return for agreeing to write about it.