Term Writing Guide

The Basic Form of a Term

There are three high-level principles that describe the content produced:

1. Unbiased
2. Timeless
3. Educational

Unbiased

Examines technical concepts and helps the reader to understand the subject in plain English. This means laying out the bare facts and letting the readers make their own informed decisions. Stick to the facts. If there is a controversy, describe both sides of the argument and let the readers decide for themselves.

Timeless

In many ways, the ever-changing world of technology is the opposite of timeless. Even so, content can be written in a timeless manner to maximize its lifetime value. Avoid words like “newest”, “latest” and “recent” in favor of dates, and remove time sensitive references.

Read the term over: if things are different next year, will it still make sense? For example, rather than saying, “The iPad 2 is the latest device from Apple,” use, “The iPad 2 was released May 2011.”

Educational

We strive to create content of value to our target audience. We use the term “educational” to encompass this principle. Our target audience is made up of the following:

• Financial Analyst
• Accountant
• Chief Financial Officer
• Financial Manager
• Economists

And also likely to include:

• Academics and students
• General computer users
• Media

Because our audience is largely professionals, writers should assume a higher level of technical knowledge. This means that basic content need not be explained; we can deal with nonprofessionals by linking to more basic content. Our audience and our focus also dictate that our terms must be tailored for this audience. This means that how any term relates to Finance - and why it would be important for an Financial professional - must be considered.

For example, some terms will have definitions that do not relate to finance. These are definitions we want to avoid, striving instead to ensure that all definitions are written in a finance context and in such a way that they will be pertinent and useful to the audience groups listed above.

Term Format

The format of the terms should be more than a basic glossary but less than an encyclopedia.

Step 1: Write a Definition

This is the bare-bones definition you would expect to see in a textbook. Every term definition must plainly state:

1. What the term is
2. What it’s for (its use)
3. Why it’s important (why might a reader want to know what it is?)

The definition should be of 100-200 words.

Step 2: How does it work?

In the second part, we want to give the plain-English explanation of how a specific Financial (term name) works. This could include examples or analogies. In some ways, this is even more important than the definition section as it should drive home the meaning and importance of the term for the reader.

This section should be 150-300 words.

7 Term-Writing Do’s and Don’ts

Do

1. Do use inclusive language. For example, use “organization” instead of “business”

or “company.”

1. Do avoid unclear phrasing.
2. Do write out all acronyms in full.
3. Do change long sentences with multiple points into bulleted lists when appropriate. Generally speaking, more than three points will be better displayed as a bulleted list

Don’t

1. Don’t capitalize a term unless it is a proper name, a brand/proprietary name, a protocol or a standard.
2. Don’t include links within the body of the term or explanation.
3. Don’t reference specific companies where the timeliness of the content could be affected.
4. Don’t define terms within terms.
5. Don’t cite another reference.
6. Don’t include information in the definition that is not relevant to Finance. So, if the term is also used in the context of business, include only the definition and information that relates to Finance.
7. Don’t make terms plural unless they only exist in plural form.
8. Don’t include examples in the definition - save them for the explanation sections.
9. Don’t get information from these three websites 
10. Question and answer blogs or website such as

WIKIANSWER or something like that

1. WIKIPEDIA

1. Forums of discussion.

Sample of terms

You can see the financial term format and writing structure from these below websites.

1. http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/

1. http://www.investopedia.com/dictionary/

1. http://www.investinganswers.com/