Tag Archive for: writing tips

“Turn signals” and good writing

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“Use ‘turn signals’ to guide your reader from sentence to sentence,” suggests Kenneth W. Davis  in The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Business Writing and Communication (p. 24).

I like Davis’ analogy, but I think it’s even more important to apply it at a higher level than sentences. Every time your article, blog post, or other written communication changes direction, you should signal that to your readers.

Two key “turn signals” for writers are headings and topic sentences.

Headings show that a new section, typically running more than one paragraph in length, has started.

A topic sentence is the first sentence of a paragraph. It sums up or introduces the topic of the paragraph that follows.

Here’s a test to see if you’re using a writer’s turn signals effectively. Read out loud your headings and topic sentences in the order in which they appear. If a listener can grasp the gist of your argument from them, you’ve done your job.

Let’s submit this blog post to the test.

  • “Use ‘turn signals’ to guide your reader from sentence to sentence,” suggests Kenneth W. Davis  in the McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Business Writing and Communication (p. 24).
  • I like Davis’ analogy, but I think it’s even more important to apply it at a higher level than sentences.
  • Two key “turn signals” for writers are headings and topic sentences.
  • Headings show that a new section, typically running more than one paragraph in length, has started.
  • A topic sentence is the first sentence of a paragraph.
  • Here’s a test to see if you’re using a writer’s turn signals effectively.

What do you think? Do turn signals help?

 

Blog post vs. white paper: How do you decide?

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An Iranian watercolor struck me as a way to show the difference between a blog post topic and a white paper topic.

“A School Scene,” which you see in the photo above, is beautiful. But it has too much going on to be a blog post.

Blog posts should focus tightly on one topic. Like the painting section below, which shows three men sitting below a tree.

A white paper is the longest piece most advisors will write. Its length means it might be able to accommodate the entire painting.

Like a blog post, a white paper should focus on a single theme. However, it offers more opportunities for depth and diversions.

In a white paper, the painting section in the upper right-hand corner would dominate. You’d work in the other areas of the painting to the extent they support the dominant section’s theme. An area with a weak, yet useful connection might become a sidebar, isolated in a box so it wouldn’t disrupt the main argument’s flow.

Some of the decorative elements in this painting might be too much for a white paper. They might be appropriate for a scholarly article, fiction, or a full-length book.

If this analogy helped you, please comment

Sometimes pictures make it easier to understand concepts normally explained using words. Did these two pictures help you? Do you have an image that helps you write better? Please share.

If your firm needs help with writing or editing white papers, please contact me. To learn more about what makes for a great white paper, read “White paper marketing: Walk a fine line.”

 

Focus your blog post or lose your readers

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“I’m trying to frame the hawk,” said my husband pointing

My husband's best shot of the hawk

My husband’s best shot of the hawk

our camera at a spot high above the Cape Cod Rail Trail. He didn’t want a teeny-tiny bird image to get lost in a big landscape. His comment made me think about how bloggers need to do something similar.

A photo in which a hawk is a tiny speck won’t draw the viewer’s eye. Similarly, a blog post that deals in generalities, and fails to get specific, will lose readers.

Hawks and financial bloggers

What might this mean for a financial blogger?

For example, you can’t cover all of international investing—the entire “sky”—in a single blog post. Instead, focus on one “hawk,” such as the role of non-US stocks in a portfolio or how developed-market stocks differ from emerging-market stocks.

Need help finding the hawk in your blog post?

If you have a hard time finding the focus of your blog posts, you’ll benefit from my blogging class for financial advisors, investment and wealth managers, and the professionals who support them. Check out “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Lesson Class for Financial Advisors.”

 

 

3 posts that can improve your blogging in 2013

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Looking over my 2012 posts about blogging, I see three tips that could change the way you blog in 2013.

1. Stay on the right side of the law!

The experts who write about compliance have overlooked a vulnerable spot for bloggers. That’s fair use of other people’s copyrighted words. You can do the right thing with the helpful resources I identify in “Legal danger for financial bloggers: Two misconceptions, three resources, one suggestion.”

2. Think creatively

Are you at a loss for topics to blog about? Pick a photo and use it to brainstorm ideas using the method I describe in “Photo + Mind Map = Blog Inspiration.”

3. Add personality

Your personality can be a powerful marketing tool. Use it to your advantage with the tips in “How to add personality and warmth to your financial writing—Part one” and “Part two.”

What about YOU?

How do you plan to improve your blogging in 2013? Are there blog posts from other bloggers that inspire your 2013 plans? Please share. Also, if you’d like to boost the effectiveness of your writing, consider taking “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Lesson Class for Financial Advisors.”

 Image courtesy of  Vlado / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How to succeed with your New Year’s resolution to blog more

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Blogging more frequently is high on my friends’ lists of writing-related New Year’s resolutions. This spurred me to wonder how you can use a great free class, “3 Tiny Habits,” to form new habits that will boost your blogging throughout the year. I am a recent fan of this class offered by BJ Fogg of Stanford University.

The thrust of Fogg’s week-long class is to get you to commit to three small behavior changes that are triggered by something you do everyday. For example, one of my recent changes is to put baking soda on my toothbrush the first time I go into the bathroom every morning. Having done that, I almost effortlessly flow into brushing and flossing my teeth. For more details on the class, you can sign up online. Fogg explains his class better than I can.

Daily habits that can help you blog

There should be a way to use Fogg’s class to help you blog more regularly. You’ll need to identify two things: 1) A tiny habit that will encourage writing and 2) a good trigger.

Where do you typically get stuck in your blogging? This is where you should look for your tiny habit.

If you’re short on ideas, your tiny habit could be to get out a piece of paper or open your mind-mapping software. Either quickly completed habit could lead to brainstorming ideas by creating a mind map.

If you have plenty of ideas that you’re not typing up, you could open a new post in WordPress, write a title down on a steno pad, or open dictation software.

If you have lots of incomplete drafts, then plan to type one word into one draft every day.

The triggers for these tiny habits could be something as simple as starting up your computer or opening your web browser.

What will YOU do?

How are you going to boost your blogging in the New Year? I’d like to hear from you, especially if you find Fogg’s techniques helpful or if you have suggestions that may help others succeed.

Different techniques work for different people. I rely heavily on the approach I describe in “No batteries required: My favorite blogging technique.” It has helped me to schedule at least one post per week from now through early April. If you’re a person who takes schoolwork seriously, you may find it helpful to sign up for my writing class, “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Lesson Class for Financial Advisors.” The class will show you you a step-by-step process for producing blog posts on a regular schedule.

 

Image courtesy of 89studio / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Guest post: “Peter Lynch Went Grocery Shopping With Me At Whole Foods The Other Day”

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I chuckled, and then I thought, I must ask this author to guest-blog for me, after I heard some of the blog post titles−for example, “How A Threesome Can Improve Your Retirement“− created by Ted Jenkin, co-CEO and founder of oXYGen Financial. I’m glad his co-CEO Kile Lewis introduced us at an FPA Experience cocktail party so Ted can share with you his ideas about how to come up with catchy titles.

Peter Lynch Went Grocery Shopping With Me

At Whole Foods The Other Day

By Ted Jenkin

For the past three years, I have been an avid personal finance blogger discussing everything from managing your wealth to mitigating your tax liability. No matter how substantive the topics I wrote about in the personal finance sector, the big question was whether someone would actually read my content. As bloggers, we often believe that our most recent post will change the lives of millions, but in reality only a handful of people may click through your e-mailed link to read your weekly blog post. The art of creating effective titles is incredibly important because if your title and opening paragraph are catchy and interesting, your readers are more inclined to check out the rest of the article.

Take the title I opened up with in this article. Did it make you at least a little bit curious about what happened when Peter Lynch went grocery shopping with me at Whole Foods the other day? Or did you think that it couldn’t possibly be true that he actually went grocery shopping with me? Perhaps I won some sort of investment contest to get the great Peter Lynch to go grocery shopping with me. In all seriousness, what I would have written about in an article like this where I threw a catchy title like that at you is how picking stocks in companies you know is better than choosing ones that you don’t know. The article would have gone on to discuss the importance of believing in the brands you buy, and said that perhaps some of your next best stock buys are the very items that you put in your grocery cart when you go to the market. It worked 30 years ago for Peter Lynch in his prime and that philosophy probably wouldn’t be a bad one to apply in today’s rocky stock market environment.

So here are three tips from one blogger to another about my thoughts on how to write catchy titles:

  1. THINK THE ENQUIRER– As the saying goes, “Enquiring minds want to know.” But it’s more like people want the dirty laundry gossip about what is going on in the lives of others. What the National Enquirer does in a most brilliant fashion is to deliver hard-hitting titles that make you want to pick up a copy at the store while checking out your groceries. Top stories during the week that I wrote this post included LATIFAH WILL DROP LESBIAN CONFESSION ON LIVE-TV, MILEY CRUSHING FOR PORN STAR!, and IS IT TRUE WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT DIANE SAWYER, BOOZY or BEAT? If you saw Diane Sawyer after the election, you surely might read the Boozy or Beat article. I know I would pay a $1.00 just to check that one out. The first point of writing good lead-ins to your blog posts is to make sure you hit your audience hard with something that may get them engaged in the first paragraph.
  2. LATE NIGHT GOOGLING– The second idea behind writing smart headlines for your blogs is to think about how people may go about searching for your content. One of the interesting things about human beings when they begin to Google is often they aren’t 100% certain what they are really looking for when they begin searching on Google. So, using intros in your headlines with phrases like “How To,” “Top 10,” and “Big Mistakes” are all beginnings to how a person may search for content. Remember that Google likes to index popular searches so try typing in a few different phrases around the content of the article you are writing to grab some ideas. This may also allow your article to rise to page one more quickly within a Google search.
  3. SEX SELLS- Whether or not you like to admit it, everyone quickly perks up when they see something hot and steamy. This is why public sex scandals and extracurricular activities become so viral in the news we read every day. How many of you quickly homed in on the recent story of David Petraeus, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, getting busted for having an extramarital affair? Would you open an article with the headline that read, “CIA Director Wants More Than Just A Google Hangout?” I recently incorporated a great “sex sells” headline in an article I wrote about pensions: “How A Threesome Can Improve Your Retirement.“ The title raised some eyebrows but got my emails more than a 50% open rate.

If you are a frequent blogger, writing ongoing content can be a challenging process especially when you’ve written more than 500 to 1,000 posts. Sometimes, if you can create yourself a juicy headline it can actually spur on the creative writing process to produce a really high quality piece of content your readers will enjoy. You don’t have to draw people in by telling them you were abducted by space aliens, but it doesn’t hurt to drop a little Kim Kardashian or Britney Spears . . . As long as you aren’t exposing any body parts 🙂

——————

oXYGen Financial, Inc. co-CEO Ted Jenkin is one of the foremost knowledgeable professionals in giving financial advice to the X and Y Generation.

TED JENKIN IS SECURITIES LICENSED THROUGH INVESTACORP, INC. A REGISTERED BROKER/DEALER MEMBER FINRA, SIPC. ADVISORY SERVICES OFFERED THROUGH INVESTACORP ADVISORY SERVICES, INC. A SEC REGISTERED INVESTMENT ADVISORY FIRM. Linked sites are strictly provided as a courtesy. Investacorp, Inc., and its affiliates, do not guarantee, approve nor endorse the information or products available at these sites nor do links indicate any association with or endorsement of the linked sites by Investacorp, Inc. and its affiliates.

Should my firm insert its name at the start of every email subject line?

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You asked plenty of great questions during my presentations on “Writing Effective Emails and Letters.” One participant asked whether a company should insert its corporate name at the start of every email subject line.

I say “No,” as long as the sender’s email address clearly indicates the corporate affiliation. The space limitations of your email subject line, which I discussed in “Don’t make this mistake in your email subject lines!” mean you shouldn’t include information that doesn’t serve a purpose. Repeating your company name in the subject line wastes space.

Does YOUR company use its name in subject lines?

If your company uses its name in every subject line, what’s the reasoning behind its approach? Does your firm’s email address not clearly reflect your company name?

Keep it simple–or else!

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If you want your readers to understand you, keep it simple.

You may be surprised by the American public’s low level of reading comprehension. More than 40 percent of adult, English-speaking hospital patients didn’t understand the following sentence:

Do not take this medication on an empty stomach.

This is according to Roger Lehrman’s “The Political Speechwriter’s Life,” which appeared in The New York Times (Nov 4, 2012). Yikes, this is scary.

Americans read, on average, at a seventh-grade level, according to Lehrman. If you want to reach them, you must write at their level. Here’s what Lehrman says about this:

You can’t hand your boss a speech saying, “It’s got all of your ideas. But 40 percent of your audience won’t know what you’re talking about.”

If you’re writing for a general audience, use plain English and keep it short. Short sentences also tend to be easier to understand.

What about writing for college-educated audiences?

You may think, “But my clients and prospects are all college-educated. Why should I keep it simple?”

Here’s my reply: your writing’s grade level is a measure of how hard you’re making your readers work to understand you. If you make their lives easier, they’re more likely to stick with you.

If your readership includes some more sophisticated readers, you can still appeal to them. I discuss some of these techniques in “How to make one quarterly letter fit clients at different levels of sophistication.”

Tools to help you assess your writing

To get a sense of your writing’s grade level, use the readability statistics in your word processing program or Hemingway App. If the numbers say you’re writing at a high grade level, you may benefit from rewriting your text.

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

April 2018 note: I replaced a no-longer-available tool with Hemingway App.

Wise words for writers from “Alpha Better Juice”

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Rereading your drafts results in better writing. That’s the bottom line of the following quote from Roy Blount Jr.’s Alpha Better Juice or, the Joy of Text:

The web is a wondrous thing…, but so many people who publish things on it seem not be aware of that heretofore traditional stage of composition that involves reading over what you have written before you present it to the world. That’s one of the key advantages of writing as opposed to chatting: you can look at what you wrote and see whether it makes sense to, for starters, yourself, in which case it might make sense to somebody else.

 

I know it’s tempting to hit “publish” or” send” as soon as you finish a blog post draft or email. I’ve done that many times myself. But next time you finish a draft, please pause to reread it. There’s often one little thing you can tweak to improve the odds that your communication will achieve its goal.

Please, no tiny fonts on your PowerPoint slides

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You don’t want to make your audience strain their eyes, so make the text on your slides sample slidebig enough.

Savvy friends have told me to go no smaller than 28 points in my PowerPoint slide text. This squares with what Nancy Duarte says in slide:ology:

For keynotes, don’t go smaller than 28 pt. If you are consistently reducing your point size to under 24 pt and using third-level bullets, you have officially created a document and not a slide.

The Financial Planning Association has similar standards, as I learned preparing for FPA Experience.

Slide:ology presents a handy tip for your slides’ visibility: “Put your file into slide sorter view. Look at the slides at 66 percent size. If you can still read them, so can your audience” (p 152). Of course, if you have unusual eyesight, like a former employee who said she had “fighter pilot eyes,” with vision better than 20/20, you may need to adjust accordingly.