Since humanity had invented writing systems and especially book press, writing became a major part of social life. People, as information consumers, want to read interesting and relevant articles on different topics. During twentieth century and with the beginning of twenty first century the demand on writings has become even higher. On top of that, economic and finance issues are hot-button topics nowadays. But before delving into details of our financial writing guide, it would be nice to get the idea who financial writer actually is.
Who is financial writer?
As it is clear from the name – a financial writer is a person who writes on a number of topics concerned with finance and economics. It may include educational content, commentaries, news articles or even printed editions content. Nowadays, though, the most popular form of that type of writing is writing for web resources on freelance base. Although some well known online resources hire fulltime employees as well.
Background
Now it is high time to move to describing essential background for being a financial writer. Usually financial writers are graduates with diplomas in economics or journalism. It is not necessary, of course, but having ground knowledge in those subjects gives you huge advantage as otherwise an enormous amount of work in self-education awaits you. It is impossible to write on a topic having mere understanding of it, after all. Further education, as for example master’s degree is not actually necessary, but again it would be better to earn one as usually well educated people with high degrees get more money for their work.
Skills
The skill set for a writer, no matter the subject, is usually the same. The most important one is critical thinking. As during their work writers operate with large amounts of information it is a must to be able to distinguish between true facts and fake. Then being a writer your style of leading through the article must be appealing, comprehensible and coherent. No one is eager to read a finance article written in a mind flow manner. As for specific FR skills a list can be very long but there are some which are considered to be of paramount importance:
- Analytical thinking
- Accounting techniques
- Modeling
- Forecasting
How to start
You should be prepared that likely there will be no employers eager to hire you without checking your writing skills. You can be also taken for a non-payed internship period. To avoid such cases you’d better have some already written articles to show your abilities. It is highly recommended to start during your studying at university to be ready to work just after graduation. You can even start with writing articles for a university newspaper or a community.
All in all, becoming a financial writer isn’t an easy thing to do. It is as complicated as any other trade but hopefully with this guide it will get a tiny bit easier for you. You should understand that working in such a sphere demands constant self-development and educations, you are to gain tons of experience before getting a job and even more after.