Clear and credible writing is rarely the result of a single draft. The strongest communicators know that thoughtful refinement is essential to delivering messages that inform, persuade, and build trust. In today’s FA Alpha Daily, we explore practical editing habits that can help financial advisors strengthen every piece of communication.
FA Alpha Daily:
Practice Management Insights
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Picture this: You’re staring right at your laptop screen heaving a sigh of relief as you’ve just finished writing your report.
You’ve spent several hours ideating, outlining, and writing,
Now you’re done with your report and you feel like it’s good enough for submission or publication.
… but wait!
Before you stop working on that report or write-up, there’s still a few more steps you have to consider before you stop working on it and use it for whatever purpose you’ve set out.
Editing Write-ups & Reports
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Being a financial advisor requires spending hours researching and turning findings into reports.
… and in today’s always-on and fast-paced world, it can be tempting to skip the important step of editing a first draft.
Unfortunately, this practice has led to the publication of articles or copies filled with typos, grammatical mistakes, stylistic errors, or worse, factual inaccuracies.
As a consequence, countless articles and various forms of copies have had to be updated or rewritten in full.
These problems could have been avoided if only the first draft was edited thoroughly in the first place.
AI writing assistants or generative AI models can help, but editing that first draft yourself remains an essential step. Some of today’s most popular models are still prone to the occasional hallucination.
So, if you want your report or write-up to be error-free, here are the steps you should consider when editing first drafts:
If it isn’t essential, cut it out or refine what you wrote.
After finishing your write-up, go through it once again and ask yourself this question: “What can I get rid of?”
Sometimes, when putting together a draft, writers come up with words, phrases, and sentences that only approximate what they intend to say, leading to a final product that’s riddled with walls of text.
Readers tend to stop reading articles with too much text and that’s why you must strike out any unnecessary words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs.
See if everything flows logically and smoothly.
Go through your draft one more time and try to read it as your reader would. This way, you’ll be able to know if everything flows smoothly and find out if there are any holes in the main and supporting arguments of your write-up.
Check if you got your facts straight.
Nothing torpedoes a write-up more than factual inaccuracies. A single error can ruin a reader’s confidence in both the author and the content he or she wrote.
To avoid this mistake, make sure that any data points or statements you made in your write-up are correct and error-free.
Spend some time away from your draft.
It’s helpful to spend some time away from your draft after you’ve fact-checked and trimmed its content. This is a very important step because imperfections that weren’t visible before will be seen once you’ve taken a look at what you’ve written with fresh eyes.
By letting time pass, you’ll spot the things you need to work on in your draft and know what to do with them.
Solicit the opinion of others.
Receiving feedback from your friends or colleagues about your draft is one of the best ways to improve your write-ups.
Reviewers can spot areas for improvement that you may have overlooked due to your familiarity with your own writing.
An external review is also the most efficient way of tweaking the tone of your draft since it enables you to solicit feedback from a reader.
There you have it—the steps you need to take after completing the first draft of your write-up or report!
By incorporating these principles into your writing, you’ll be able to:
Boost your credibility in the eyes of prospects and clients
Craft reports that are free from errors and easy to read
Adding this extensive editing routine into your workflow might take additional time, but trust us, these will help you out in the long run.
Best regards,
Joel Litman & Rob Spivey
Chief Investment Officer &
Director of Research
at Valens Research
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