“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.”
— Stephen King, On Writing
Most financial writing has a problem, and once you notice it, you’ll see it everywhere.
A blog post about retirement planning uses the phrase “tax-efficient decumulation strategy.”
A client newsletter refers to “sequence-of-returns risk in the fragile decade.”
A prospecting email mentions “asset location optimization.”
Each of these terms is technically correct.
And they’re all aimed at the wrong reader.
Your reader isn’t a Chartered Financial Analyst; they’re more likely a dentist, a schoolteacher, or a graphic designer wondering whether they can retire at sixty-two, or whose accountant just mentioned something about a Roth conversion, or who inherited an IRA and doesn’t know how much of it they’re allowed to spend.
The words that would help all of those readers are on the writer’s own vocabulary list, and they’re both short and mildly embarrassing.
If we’re being honest, vanity is what tends to ruin most financial writers. A writer with a finance background wants the finance readers in the room to know he knows things. So, he reaches for the vocabulary that signals membership.
The problem is that, while that signal lands with the credentialed audience he wasn’t writing for, it usually misses the actual audience he wanted to reach. And they invariably bounce off the third instance of jargon and close the tab.
The advisor whose name is on the blog gets a beautifully credentialed article that nobody outside the industry will read; the exact opposite of what an advisor’s blog exists to do.
Fixing this problem requires a radical mindset shift that amounts to refusing to dress anything up. This is a different discipline than dumbing anything down, and often gets confused with it.
“Sequence-of-returns risk in the fragile decade” describes a real phenomenon.
But so does “the risk that a bad market in your first years of retirement wrecks the whole plan.”
That second sentence is the one that helps the dentist, schoolteacher, and graphic designer. It contains the same idea, uses simpler words, and reads as though a human wrote it for another human. Nothing was lost in translation, and the sentence became findable, both by search engines and by the reader typing “am I going to be okay if the market drops right when I retire” into a phone at eleven at night.
A decent test for whether a paragraph has drifted toward the wrong reader is to read it aloud, then ask whether you would say it that way to a client sitting across from you. If the answer is no, the paragraph has slipped into industry mode.
If you want to impress the credentialed reader, write something for an academic journal; that is the venue built for the audience you keep hoping is reading.
Your blog isn’t, and shouldn’t be, that venue. It’s for the person who came looking for an answer, who doesn’t know your industry, and who has a decision to make.
Give her the short words. She may just thank you by staying.
The version of this you can outsource
The Financial Freelancer writes for the reader across the desk, not the one in the CFA cohort. Every draft is deliberately short-worded, plainly structured, and voiced like someone who talks to actual clients, because that’s what advisor content is supposed to do.
If your last few posts read like the exam prep and not the practice, my contact form is below. Drop me a line and I’ll show you how to stop the CFA from sneaking in.
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