Rof Writing Style

Review of Finance Writing Style

Use this after the core result is stable. RoF is read across all of finance — empirical and theoretical — and held to top-three-finance-journal standards, so the prose must make a first-order contribution legible to a general finance reader fast, not read as a narrow field-journal appendix. Polish only once identification/results (empirical) or assumptions/results (theory) are settled.

When to trigger

• The prose buries the contribution; a reader cannot find it quickly.
• The abstract exceeds 150 words or never states the finding.
• The introduction wanders before reaching the question and the result.

Revision rules

• Keep the abstract within the 150-word limit and make the finance contribution explicit: open with the question and approach, then state the result (a number for empirical work, the proposition for theory), and close with the economic implication. Count the words.
• Follow the RoF intro arc: question, why it is open or hard, setting/approach, headline result early, mechanism and interpretation, contribution against the top-three frontier, brief roadmap.
• Preserve double-blind anonymity: no author-identifying references, acknowledgements, grants, repositories, or self-revealing wording (and scrub PDF metadata).
• Use Chicago citation and reference style, consistently.
• Explain why the result meets top-three-finance standards before drilling into mechanics; lead the intro with the finance question, not the estimator.
• Quantify rather than using vague intensifiers; define notation once.
• Keep the full manuscript within the 60-page total cap, including appendices, bibliography, figures, and tables — economical prose is part of fitting the cap.

Abstract rebuild — worked example

Illustrative; the rebuilt version is 55 words, well under the 150-word ceiling:

Before: "This paper investigates the relationship between climate risk and
bank lending using a large sample of European banks and several econometric
techniques. Results show significant effects."

After:  "How does flood-risk exposure reprice bank credit? Matching 1.2
million loans to address-level hazard maps across six EU countries, we show
lenders charge 14 bp more per one-s.d. risk increase - but only after the
2021 floods, implying salience rather than information moves climate
pricing."

The rebuilt abstract states question, data, number, condition, and economic message — the skeleton a full 150-word RoF abstract scales up from.

Five edit passes for the general-finance reader

• Pass 1 — claims: every paragraph's first sentence carries a finding or an argumentative step; delete throat-clearing about importance.
• Pass 2 — numbers: replace "substantial", "strong", and "robust" with the bp, percent, or euro figure; at least one magnitude per headline claim.
• Pass 3 — jargon: subfield terms (SFDR Article 9, LTRO, UCITS) get a one-clause gloss at first use, because the RoF reader spans asset pricing to household finance.
• Pass 4 — anonymity sweep: search for author surnames, "our earlier paper", grant numbers, and repository URLs; scrub metadata after the final compile, not before.
• Pass 5 — cap: each page of prose trimmed is a page of identification evidence the 60-page ceiling lets you keep.

Prose objections from RoF reports and the fix

• "The introduction oversells" → cut adjectives, keep figures; let the event-study plot carry the conviction the adjectives were faking.
• "I could not locate the contribution until page 7" → move the headline number into the first two pages, per the intro arc above.
• "Well written but reads like a field-journal piece" → re-anchor the opening paragraph in the general finance question rather than the institutional detail; the institution is the laboratory, not the point.

Anti-patterns

• An abstract over 150 words, or one that states the topic but not the finding.
• Leading the intro with method instead of the finance question.
• Inconsistent or non-Chicago citations.

Output format

[Style diagnosis] clear / too narrow / too long / anonymity risk
[Abstract fix] <150-word target>
[Finance framing] <first-order contribution sentence>
[Page compression] <what to cut or move>
[Anonymity edits] <specific fixes>

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → Review-of-Finance-Skills/skills/rof-writing-style/SKILL.md