Webinar On Business Writing for Financial Professionals

Overview:

Financial professionals realize that demonstrating mastery is not limited to preparing and presenting meeting briefings and firing off summary emails on business issues. Writing proficiency emerges from their ability to craft operational and financial inquiries, fiscal analyses, revenue forecasts, internal justifications, appropriation requests, client proposals, business cases, and a whole host of other financial documents depending on their organizational responsibilities. Their formal training in these skills has been limited to academic contexts, and their company may not necessarily use standardized methods for composing these diverse documents. Thus, specialized training in financial business writing ensures that financial professionals write documents which express their organizational objectives and business purposes.

Poor writing causes corporations to spend billions of dollars annually on remedial training. This problem is especially significant as the flattening of the global marketplace has increasingly burdened financial professionals to write high-profile, complex documents for diverse audiences on the fly. They often perform this essential work in diverse locations, such as commuter trains, hotel lobbies, and conference rooms; during fast-paced, noisy business meetings, and under exceedingly tight time pressures. While many financial professionals benefit from using templates when developing major documents, circumstances often demand they think on their feet by either adapting the template to the situation or abandoning it for an alternative method.

Financial business writers need a toolbox of memorable and practical strategies and techniques that will guide them through the writing process. This webinar includes the key principles of focused, high-impact writing. Working through the phases of revising (ideas), editing (expression), and proofreading (overlooked errors), this session looks at the rewriting process from levels:

• The document level of purposefulness
• The paragraph level of emphasis, unity, coherence, and visual appeal
• The sentence level of impact, clarity, conciseness, consistency, and correctness
• The word level of diction. This systematic, top-down approach will prove invaluable when applying the webinar principles to their unique business-writing situations

Areas Covered in the Session:

• Four levels of quality controlling finance-related messages
• Using a structure that reinforces the purpose
• Emphasizing key points through solid paragraphing
• Employing formatting devices to guide readers through complex data
• Highlighting the relevance of data through transitions
• Editing sentences for clarity through active voice
• Applying the principles of conciseness to get to the point
• Maintaining a consistent message through parallel structure
• Remedying the most prevalent sentence errors that compromise the quality of language

Training Objectives:

• Focus the audience on the purpose of the message
• Determine the appropriate level of content
• Organize data to focus the reader
• Heighten the importance of facts to address the reader's concerns

Who Will Benefit:

• Accounting Professionals
• Banking Managers
• Business Forecasters
• Economic Advisor
• Equity Researchers
• Financial Planners
• Insurance Professionals
• Investment Consultants
• Risk Analysts
• Tax Specialists

Instructor:

Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. has developed, delivered, and supervised communication training programs for a wide range of managerial, administrative, and technical professionals in corporate, government, and academic environments. He has also taught writing and presentation skills on the graduate and undergraduate university levels, most recently for the Beijing International MBA program at Peking University. He has served as an essay and speech evaluator for the Educational Testing Service on standardized tests such as the Graduate Record Examination, College Level Examination Placement, Graduate Management Admissions Test, and the Test of Spoken English. He also has provided writing coaching and assessment services for numerous corporate employees. Dr. Vassallo is the author of the books How to Write Fast Under Pressure, on writing efficiently; The Art of On-the-Job Writing, on work-related writing; The Art of E-Mail Writing, on business email;

The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze, on philosophy and teaching; and The Choice Movement and Educational Equity, on education. He also writes Words on the Line, a column and a blog on effective writing. He has contributed to many literary and educational publications, and to books by McGraw-Hill, St. Martin’s Press, and Simon & Schuster. Sixteen of his plays have been staged in globally, and he has won or been a finalist in several state and national playwriting competitions. Dr. Vassallo holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Baruch College, a master’s in education from Lehman College, and a doctorate in educational theory from Rutgers University. He is a past president of the New Jersey College English Association.