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.

“The Which Trials” according to “Woe is I”

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Woe Is I

If you’ve ever worried whether to use “which” or “that” you’re not alone. It took me years to figure out. However, Patricia O’Connor lays out the rules nicely in “The Which Trials” section of her book, Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.

Which vs. that

Here are O’Connor’s rules from page 3 of her book.

  • If you can drop the clause and not lose the point of the sentence, use which. If you can’t, use that.
  • A which clause goes inside commas. A that clause doesn’t.

Investment commentary example

I grabbed a sentence from a John Mauldin commentary to illustrate O’Connor’s rules for using which. In “A Player to Be Named Later,” he wrote, “The carrot is 1% financing for your banks, which can then buy your bonds at 4-5-6% (depending on the country).”

Which is proper in this sentence because the following sentence makes sense: “The carrot is 1% financing for your banks.” Mauldin properly places a comma before the start of the which clause.

Here’s a Mauldin sentence that properly uses that: “Will those lines look like the one that Colonel Travis drew with his sword at the Alamo, where those who crossed and joined him knew their fate?” A sentence consisting only of “Will those lines look like the one?” doesn’t make sense. Thus, that is required.

The first sentence of Mauldin’s commentary requires a judgment call about whether the second clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence. It says, “We have come to the end of yet another European Summit that was supposed to be the one to fix the problem.” The shortened version of the sentence–“We have come to the end of yet another European Summit”–works, suggesting which should replace that. However, it seems important to me that the summit failed to fix the problem. Without that phrase, the meaning of the sentence would change. Thus, it satisfies O’Connor’s stipulation that without the that clause you would “lose the point of the sentence.”

You’ll find more on these rules in “Which Versus That” by Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty, one of my favorite online grammar resources. For a more technical explanation, see “Introduction and General Usage in Defining Clauses” on the Purdue Online Writing Lab site.

By the way, I wish Mauldin hadn’t capitalized “Summit.” But that’s a whole other issue, which I’ve explored in “Do you use ‘pride capitals’?”

Woe is I is a fun read

I recommend O’Connor’s Woe is I as a fun read. Plus, you may learn something from it. I know I did. I’m glad I learned about it from a post on the Copyediting Facebook page.

Guest post: “Boost Chart Impact with Interpretation”

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Marketing communications consultant Susan Becker and I met through LinkedIn. I’ve enjoyed many exchanges with her about how to communicate more effectively. Her guest post focuses on making the most of charts.

Boost Chart Impact with Interpretation
By Susan K. Becker

Because most people digest information visually rather than verbally, we are urged to stop relying on bullet points and, instead, to present information visually. For financial writers, this often means presenting  complex data in charts.

Unfortunately, in communicating visually, we often tend to sacrifice the verbal interpretation necessary to make the data easily understood. This post discusses two techniques to remedy the misleading assumption that “the numbers speak for themselves.” They result in charts that engage your audience and advance the story revealed in your data.

These techniques are:

  1. Interpretive titles that communicate the overall point of each chart, instead of just labeling what is shown (e.g., quarterly returns)
  2. Labels and call-outs that bring attention to what the reader should take away

I should point out that this post discusses investment writing using text with charts. We should design for the medium, so the suggestions here would be modified for a slide presentation that is projected or web-based.

1. Use interpretive titles

Marketwatch interactive charts offer abundant choices for presenting data. The chart below compares a stock’s 12-month stock performance against the SPX and DJIA.

The chart needs an interpretive title explaining its overall point, instead of a label like “12-month Performance.” A good question is, “What is its overall point?” The chart tells several stories: e.g., “Stock performance increasingly lagged the indexes, as the year went on”; or, “Stock performance declined sharply in August and ended the year at the same level.”

Use the interpretive title that furthers your message. For example, if your story focuses on ROI, you would want a title explaining “Stock X’s performance turned negative in March and continued to diverge from the indexes, ending the  year deep under water.”

2. Use interpretive labels and call-outs

Verbally signaling key data is another useful technique for the text-and-charts format, which accommodates more visual elements than slides projected during a presentation. The chart below tells the story of a web industry segment’s roughly one-year wild ride, 3Q99 through 4Q00, in a simple line chart made eloquent by interpretive notes.

If you have less white space, overlay the text in call-outs (click “Shapes” in Word and PowerPoint).

Susan K. Becker provides consulting and coaching in marketing communication and presentations at Manhattan-based Becker Consulting Services. View her work at http://www.slideshare.net/SusanKBecker and follow her on Twitter @SKBeckerCoach.

What do you think about “What do you think?”

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“What do you think?” is a weak ending to an email, according to Power Sales Writing: Using Communication to Turn Prospects into Clients by Sue Hershkowitz-Coore.

I said “uh oh” to myself upon reading this because I’ve used this in emails accompanying proposals. Hershkowitz-Coore suggests you encourage your reader “to give you the result you want by offering your opinion and asking for her approval.” She prefers a closing such as “Please let me know which direction you prefer, and with your approval, I’ll move ahead. “

I like the idea of nudging prospects in the right direction, but I also want to show that I’m open to my prospect’s feedback.

There must be a middle ground. What do YOU think?

What professional writers know

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Financial bloggers, investment professionals, and wealth managers can benefit from learning a few things that professional writers know.

Photo: edmittance

Everyone can benefit from a good proofreader and editor

It’s hard to read your writing with fresh eyes. This is why professional writers feel grateful when someone checks their work for them. If you’re on your own, put your draft away for a day – or even an hour – before rereading it.

Put the good stuff first

You need to snare your readers with the first paragraph, if not the first sentence or even the title. So, share information your readers will care about at the very beginning of your blog post, white paper, or other written communication.

Keep it short

Like you, your audience has too much to read. So keep it short.

Avoid errors of the illiterate

When you make elementary school students’ mistakes – such as confusing its and it’s – your readers question your expertise in other areas, too. An editor can help you identify your common errors, so you can review a checklist before releasing error-riddled communications to clients and prospects.