The Investment Writing Handbook

Epilogue: Where Investment Writing Is Headed in the Twenty‐First Century

“If you enjoy writing, you're doing something wrong.”¹

—Stanley Karnow

For a writer to say that?

As a journalist and historian, Karnow researched his subjects assiduously and produced volumes of thorough reportage over more than half a century. Unless he was a talented masochist of a writer—and it sure doesn't look like it—he must have nurtured a zeal for the craft. This leaves one to take his statement for what it was—a word of irony for those who do enjoy putting pen to paper: Writing is difficult.

Investment writing is especially difficult. Trapping you between a complex subject matter, a blank page, and perhaps an intensely brainy and demanding author you're ghosting, each new assignment requires you to be—by turns—investigator, interviewer, stenographer, interpreter, reader, learner, wordsmith, negotiator, and alchemist. You need background knowledge in investments to understand the professionals who lack the time and skills to write themselves and rely on you as their verbal crutch. And you need to cultivate good relations with them, adjust to their preferred methods of working with you, accommodate their idiosyncrasies, decipher their logic, internalize their thought patterns, channel their voices, and telegraph their styles.

Yet it's precisely these difficulties—and the required mix of intellectual and personal skills to tackle them—that should encourage investment writers at a time when automation ...