What could possibly be less exciting than a blog post about capitalization, punctuation, and number-usage rules? A blog post that combines all of those stylistic topics with a lecture about how your firm should have a style guide to help you enforce consistency across your marketing materials—that’s what!
But just because style rules aren’t captivating, that doesn’t mean they are unimportant. In fact, style inconsistency is the “silent killer” when it comes to how people judge the quality of your financial writing. Inconsistent style usage doesn’t jump off the page the same way that typos, grammar errors, or awkward sentence structures do. But over time, style inconsistencies can erode your perceived competence and make your firm look unprofessional.
Why Style Consistency Matters
If your company is like most financial services firms, writing white papers, quarterly investor letters, blog posts, or other forms of content can be a team sport. For example, when an asset management firm creates a quarterly market commentary, an analyst might write the intro and conclusion, one portfolio manager writes the section about equity markets, another portfolio manager writes the section about fixed-income markets, and the team’s economist writes the section about macro trends.
Before you know it, a two-page letter contains sections written by four different people. And these people might have differing opinions about whether “fixed income” should be hyphenated when used as an adjective, whether the preceding quarter should be referred to as “the third quarter of 2017” or “3Q-2017,” and whether the quarter’s GDP growth should be written as “3.10%” or “3.1 percent.”
In a vacuum, none of these discrepancies may seem like a big deal. But when the reader sees multiple style inconsistencies in your writing, it’s not a good look for your firm. At best, it conveys a lack of attention to detail; at worst, it suggests that your teammates aren’t on the same page and may not be collaborating effectively.
How a Style Guide Strengthens Your Brand
Rather than having an analyst, two portfolio managers, and an economist waste valuable time and energy debating whether it should be “3.10%” or “3.1 percent,” your firm should have an established rule for how these stylistic issues are handled in all of your external communications. These rules should be compiled in a style guide that is shared across the firm.
Your style guide should provide rules for how your firm handles the most common issues related to various stylistic questions. For example:
- Capitalization: Do you capitalize the names of departments, services, and products? Do you capitalize all words in headlines and sub-headlines?
- Punctuation: Do you use the serial (a.k.a. Oxford) comma, which is the comma before “and” in a series of three or more? Do you use periods at the end of longer bullet points?
- Hyphenation: Which commonly used compound modifiers do you hyphenate?
- Names and titles: Do you capitalize your team members’ titles? When referring to someone more than once, do you use just the person’s last name or do you add Mr./Ms.?
- Numbers: How many digits past the decimal point do you show? Do you spell out numbers or use numerals?
- Voice: Do you refer to your company in first or third person? Do you use second person or third person in client communications?
You may want to also include guidelines for the tone that your firm uses in your external communications. This section might explain how formal or conversational the writing should be. Although these guidelines are harder to codify through rules, you can provide examples of language that fits and language that doesn’t fit.
Another area you may want to include in your style guide is information about your design and formatting standards. Many companies, however, especially those with in-house design teams, keep this information in separate “visual identity guides.” Regardless, there should be some document that has your firm’s fonts, color codes, and logo usage rules.
How to Get Started With Your Style Guide
Your style guide should be a living, evolving document. Rather than sitting down and trying to think through all of the common stylistic questions that need to be answered all at once, just get started by creating a framework and populating it with a few examples in each category. Then, as other stylistic questions come up—and they inevitably will—you can add them to the style guide.
To help you get started, we have created a template for you.
Before you create a style guide, it’s important to remember that most of these stylistic questions aren’t a matter of “right or wrong;” they are more a matter of preference. That being said, at Wentworth Financial Communications, we definitely have strong opinions on many of these stylistic questions. If you have any questions about how to develop your style guide or which rules you should adopt for your firm, we are happy to help.
Regardless of where your firm lands on whether “fixed income” should be hyphenated as a compound modifier, having a style guide that settles the debate is much better than having some of your senior team members waste valuable time arguing about a hyphen.
About the Author
Scott Wentworth is the founder and head financial writer at Wentworth Financial Communications. Scott and the team of writers and editors at WFC help professionals across the financial services industry build their brands by creating investment-grade white papers, bylined articles, newsletters, blogs, social media posts, and other forms of content marketing. As you can see from the preceding sentence, WFC’s style guide includes using the serial comma, using the company’s initials on second reference, and hyphenating “investment grade” when it’s used as a compound modifier.