Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
Above all, favor brevity.
The value of that advice is easy to see. Consider the first draft of my opening line, for instance:
The preeminent rule for good writing is, perhaps, to always strive to use as few words as possible and to keep those words as short as possible.
Wow. What a difference! Here a few tricks that you too can use to convert your initial drafts into “plain speak.”
Choose words wisely
Begin by looking for extra words that go without saying, especially adjectives and adverbs. For example, I started by removing qualifiers like “good” and “always.” No harm done.
Use higher-level words where they work well. For example, the language became more formal when I replaced “to use as few words as possible and to keep those words as short as possible” with “to favor brevity.” But, boy, was I able to get to the point. Sometimes, elevating the language can improve the results.
Other times, it can’t. For example, why say “preeminent” when “above all” is easier? Simplify fancy words whenever they don’t add value.
Investment advisors, however, must sometimes sacrifice brevity on the altar of compliance. To ensure that your communications reflect full disclosure and scrupulous accuracy, you have to add clarifications such as “expected” to “returns” and detailed sourcing to your charts.
Proceed in an orderly fashion
Remember good, old “verb-subject” sentence-parsing from high school English? Even if you don’t, I’ll bet you can intuitively sense that dropping “perhaps” into the middle of an otherwise tight sentence can throw off readability. On a second draft, I moved “perhaps” to the front, where it wouldn’t interfere with the flow:
Perhaps the first rule for writing is to favor brevity.
Upon reflection, I removed it entirely. By considering the word order, I also was able to shorten “rules of writing” to “writing rule” in yet another draft:
The first writing rule is to favor brevity.
Finally, I cut it to the bone. Without “perhaps,” the statement is more confident. One word at a time, consider the order of your words.
