# Writing Econ > ALWAYS load BEFORE drafting, revising or grading FINANCE or ACCOUNTING journal prose — 'write the paper', 'draft the introduction of my JF submission', 'revise Section 3', 'polish the job-market paper', 'does this read like a finance paper', 'tighten the abstract', 'is this well written for JFE/RFS/JAR/TAR', 'should I write we find or the paper shows', 'do I cross-reference by Section or Part', 'is agents jargon'. Covers Journal of Finance, JFE, RFS, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, JAE, CAR, RAST, and the working and job-market papers aimed at them. This skill carries ONLY what is additional to the base register: load `writing-general` alongside it — the diction, tic, vindicated-phrase and formatting rules live there and are assumed here. Do NOT load this for a law review article or legal scholarship (use `writing-legal`) or for a comment letter, memo, brief or professional email (`writing-general` alone) — importing a finance rule into either of those makes the prose worse. - Skill: `edwinhu/writing-econ` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add edwinhu/writing-econ` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/edwinhu/writing-econ/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Research & Search - Author: edwinhu (https://skillmd.com/u/edwinhu) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/edwinhu/writing-econ --- # Econ register (`econ`) **The base is `writing-general`, and it is assumed loaded alongside this file.** Everything below is what is *additional* for finance and accounting journal prose. Nothing from the base is restated here. You are drafting and revising **finance / accounting journal prose** — the register of the *Journal of Finance*, *JFE*, *RFS*, *Journal of Accounting Research*, *The Accounting Review*, *JAE*, *CAR* and *RAST*, and of the working papers and job-market papers aimed at them. Everything here is measured, not asserted. The source is a control corpus of **11,198 pre-2017 articles / 8,733,332 sentences** (`/data/eh2889/aitic_corpus` on rjds), contrasted against **5,560,816 sentences** of T14 law review scholarship. Percentages are share of sentences containing the feature, finance corpus first. Rates written `n/M` are hits per million sentences. ## Register: what actually distinguishes this corpus | feature | finance | law | do | |---|---|---|---| | `we` | **7.75%** | 0.87% | The authorial `we` is standard — nine times the law rate. Use it. | | `we find / show / document` | **0.58%** | 0.02% | The idiomatic way to state a result, 29× the law rate. `We find that…`, `We document…` | | `regression` / `coefficient` / `standard error` | **2.25%** | 0.05% | 45× the law rate. The vocabulary of the method is the substance. | | parentheticals | **4.73%** | 1.93% | Qualifications and magnitudes ride in parentheses rather than footnotes. | | `e.g.` / `i.e.` | **1.23%** | 0.58% | Twice the law rate. | | `suggests that` | **0.70%** | 0.20% | Standard hedge for an inference from evidence. | | `Section 2` | **0.27%** | 0.09% | Cross-reference by **Section**, numerically. Never "Part II". | | `This paper` | **0.28%** | 0.02% | The self-reference. Lowercase p. | | `This Article` | 0.00% | **0.06%** | Wrong register. Do not write it. | | `supra` / `infra` / `id.` | **0.00%** | 1.91% | Absent. Never use Bluebook short forms here. | | quotation marks | 1.68% | **8.36%** | Quote sparingly — a fifth of the law rate. Paraphrase and cite. | | semicolons | 2.27% | **4.33%** | Half the law rate. Prefer two sentences. | | `may` / `might` | 1.99% | **3.56%** | Hedge less than law prose does. State the estimate and its standard error. | ## Conventions - **Lead with the finding, not the literature.** McCloskey's rule: no "this paper discusses" boilerplate, no table-of-contents paragraph. Say what you found. - **Inline citations** (`Fama and French (1993)`), not footnotes. Footnotes carry robustness qualifications and data caveats. - **Cross-reference by Section**, numerically (`Section 3.2`). - **Report magnitudes with their uncertainty.** A coefficient without a standard error is not a result. Give the economic magnitude, not just the significance. - **Name the identification assumption.** Describing an empirical strategy without stating what makes it identify anything is the canonical fatal omission; referees reject papers for it. - **Tables are self-explanatory.** Words in headings, not acronyms — `Logarithm of Domestic Price`, not `LPDOM`. ## McCloskey, run through the finance corpus The source guide is McCloskey's *Economical Writing*, vendored in full at `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/writing/references/economical-writing-full.md` — read it there for the full text of any rule below. **Where this file and that guide disagree, this file controls.** McCloskey's prescriptions were checked against the same corpora and sorted three ways. ### Ship | rule | why it holds | |---|---| | No boilerplate opener — `This paper discusses…`, `As we shall see`, `The rest of this paper is organized as follows` | It signals you have not found the hook. Open with the finding. | | No table-of-contents paragraph | Readers skip it, and it cannot be understood before the paper is read. | | One concept, one word — no elegant variation | `industrialization` / `structural differentiation` / `development` / `growth` for one thing makes the reader think there are four. Look back and reuse the word. | | No ersatz economics — `skyrocketing` (2.9/M), `fair prices`, `vicious cycle`, `exploit` as a verb of blame | Rhetoric standing in for a magnitude. Give the number. | | Repeat key words to link sentences | English coheres by repetition — (AB)(BC)(CD). `Not only… but also` is not cohesion. | | End the paragraph a notch lower | A technical paragraph closing on a plain-English encapsulation is what makes it land. | | Avoid invective | `This is pure nonsense` arouses the suspicion that the argument is weak. | ### Advisory | rule | measured reality | what to actually do | |---|---|---| | Delete every `very` | `very ` at 3,277/M | Delete the ones doing no work. A blanket rule fires constantly and is not a tell. | | Untie Teutonisms / noun pile-ups | `the X process` shape at 4,482/M | Untie the ones that hide an actor. `factor price equalization` is a term of art; leave it. | | Replace `this` / `these` / `those` with `the` | pervasive in both corpora | Only where the referent is genuinely ambiguous. | | Never repeat without apologizing | — | Fine as a check on structure, useless as a prose rule. | | Drop the metric conversions | — | Convert once, then trust the reader. Not worth a finding. | ### Dropped | rule | why it is dropped | |---|---| | `agents` → `people` | **1,728/M** in the finance corpus. `agents` names the modelled decision-maker; `people` is a different claim. This rule rewrites the model, not the prose. | | `hypothesize` → `suppose` | **683/M** in the finance corpus. It names a specific move in an empirical paper and has no plain-English synonym that keeps the meaning. | | Avoid the authorial `we` (inherited from the general layer) | `we` runs **7.75%** here, 8.9× the law rate. It is the register. | | Prefer active voice on principle | passive 8.55% finance vs 7.91% law — not a register marker. | ## Vindicated in this corpus specifically Beyond the shared list in `writing-general`: `we acknowledge that` runs **72.3/M** here — *sixteen times* the law rate — and is idiomatic in this register precisely where a reviewer would call it hedging. `Of course,` runs 299.9/M. `To be sure,` is rarer here (11.5/M) than in law but is still attested and still not an AI tell.