Diagnosis: Research-Based Approaches for Measures

Abstract

Based on the integration of the results of Part I and Part II, this chapter develops research-based measures and interventions for practitioners regarding context, product, and process. This includes the identification of good practices and the design of workplace techniques.

Measures have to be developed diligently and chosen carefully in transdisciplinary collaboration. From a theoretical perspective, they should allow to further develop existing theories which are based on empirical results and insights regarding appealing real-life issues. From a practical perspective, they should solve the problem by taking the practitioners’ professional setting into account (Chapter 2).

In the financial industry, various efforts are underway to facilitate the understanding of financial analysis texts. The financial experts Heri and Holzer, for example, are trying to teach the general public “financialese” on an Internet platform called fintool.ch launched in 2014 (Heri, 2014). This platform offers a plethora of free information: dozens of video lessons that are between 45 and 448 minutes long as well as more than 500 videos on selected topics in finance. The platform’s claim “Geldwissen für alle. Unabhängig. Neutral. Aktuell.” (Fintool, 2021; translation Marlies Whitehouse: “Financial knowledge for all. Independent. Neutral. Up-to-date.”), therefore, is aimed at an audience that has a lot of time and is dedicated to finance.

The financial supervisory authority BaFin takes a different approach by demanding that banks provide customers with a glossary of technical terms as from December 2013 (Seibel, 2013). Thereby, the most important technical terms with as many of their variants as possible should be listed. It is intended that the addressees of this glossary should consult it when reading financial analysts’ texts.

There are many more such examples, and their solution always seems to be: What the texts themselves do not achieve is to be provided from elsewhere. Against the background of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), according to which the majority of financial analysts’ reports, studies, and recommendations is only accessible to investors who are either customers of a bank or pay for these text products, as well as the steadily growing competition by the sprouting of digital financial institutions that forces banks to rethink their unique selling proposition, this approach does not promise to be successful.

The approach of this study, therefore, is a different one: namely to start where the texts originate—with the analysts in the financial institutions (Sect. 8.1). This can be done top-down, through better institutional conditions for the writers (Sect. 8.1.1), and bottom-up, through competence building for the writers (Sect. 8.1.2). Thereby, existing good practices need to be identified (Sect. 8.2) and working techniques as well as further complementing measures need to be derived and designed from research-based findings (Sect. 8.3).

1 Financial Analysts as Starting Point

But why start with the analysts and not with the other participants of the financial community (Sect. 4.4.4), i.e., the journalists, the rating agencies, or the investors themselves?

Journalists: It could be argued that financial journalism already does translation work by preparing information from companies and the financial community, for example financial analysts, and translating it into an easily understandable language for a broad readership. However, such an argumentation line would fall short of context knowledge in finance (Sect. 4.4.4.2): Firstly, an investor cannot rely on journalistic articles reporting in detail on the latest developments of the company whose shares are held by the investor. Secondly, it is not the task of financial journalism to give concrete recommendations for action—i.e., whether stock positions should be built up, held, or sold. And thirdly, the financial world cannot rely on the professional competence of media professionals because they are not always profoundly familiar with the mechanisms and backgrounds they report on (e.g., Reckinger & Wolff, 2011; Whitehouse, 2019).

Rating agencies: The credit ratings of the rating agencies, consisting of a rating and an explanatory text, are also aimed at investors, but not at all investor groups: they are primarily intended for financial specialists. This is reflected in detail, for example, in a publication by Standard & Poor’s, one of the leading rating agencies, which explains what credit ratings are and for whom they are intended: “Guide to credit rating essentials: What are credit ratings and how do they work?” (Standard & Poor’s, 2018). The section “Who uses credit ratings” contains the following description for investors:

Investors most often use credit ratings to help assess credit risk and to compare different issuers and debt issues when making investment decisions and managing their portfolios. Individual investors, for example, may use credit ratings in evaluating the purchase of a municipal or corporate bond from a risk tolerance perspective. Institutional investors, including mutual funds, pension funds, banks, and insurance companies, often use credit ratings to supplement their own credit analysis of specific debt issues. In addition, institutional investors may use credit ratings to establish thresholds for credit risk and investment guidelines. A rating may be used as an indication of credit quality, but investors should consider a variety of factors, including their own analysis. (Standard & Poor’s, 2018, p. 8)

Long story cut short, investors must also include their own analysis when deciding whether or not to invest in a security. Whereas this is daily business for institutional investors, it can be a difficult task for retail investors (Sect. 6.4.2). In addition, rating agencies only rate companies that are financed with bonds on the capital market; companies that have not issued bonds are not rated by rating agencies. An investor who holds shares in a company that has not issued any bonds will therefore not be able to read an assessment from the rating agencies.

Investors: It is conceivable to make the target groups more familiar with financial concepts and to improve their financial literacy, but it is hardly feasible to the necessary extent (Sect. 4.4.4.3). Thus, all retail customers of a bank would have to be specifically trained in courses, which would be expensive and would require a very large interest of the retail investors. Another possibility would be to equip financial analysis texts with extensive glossaries which describe and explain the technical terms. However, these glossaries would have to be tailored and adapted to each individual text, which would lead to more work (proofreading) and higher production costs (longer texts). In addition, it would require much more reading time from the target groups.

Taken together, journalists, rating agencies and investors are not suitable as starting points for solving the problem. This takes us back to the financial analysts as the primary addressees of practical measures. Systemically, the communicative potential of the analysts’ texts can be improved in two ways: top-down by financial institutions (Sect. 8.1.1), and bottom-up by the financial analysts (Sect. 8.1.2).

1.1 Top-Down Approach: Defining Target Groups

The results from Chapters 4–6 show that the same financial texts cannot be used arbitrarily for different addressees mainly for three reasons: first, the text products must correspond with the addressees’ financial literacy, such that the readers’ expectations can be fulfilled; second, the sprouting of digital financial institutions forces banks to rethink their unique selling proposition (USP) which is to offer reliable guidance; and third, with the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), the majority of financial analysts’ reports, studies and recommendations is only accessible to investors who are either customers of a bank or pay for these text products. In other words, the banks need to perform also regarding their text products which includes target-oriented writing. Therefore, it is vital that financial institutions and organisations define target reader groups. This means that the organisations need to evaluate and decide which text products are suitable for which target group, such that financial analysis texts can exploit their communication potential. These reader segments and the standards for each segment need to be communicated to all employees who are part of the document cycling and text production process. The three steps—target group definition, text design, and knowledge management—sound like extra work. Once installed, however, target-group-specific communication proves to be an instrument to gain customer loyalty (Sect. 10.2.3).

If investors better understand financial analysis texts and feel adequately addressed, this can promote trust and lead to a stronger bond with the financial institution, which also benefits the organisation: investors will conclude their financial transactions where they feel understood as target group. The results have shown that financial institutions could benefit from recognising the value and potential of texts from a market economy perspective which in the long run is advantageous for them and their customers.

1.2 Bottom-Up Approach: Training Writing Skills

The writing skills of many financial analysts are rarely specifically promoted or trained, although writing is an indispensable and significant part of their job. Various writing coaching projects showed that even analysts from the same organisation do not fully understand the investment recommendations of colleagues who cover other sectors and industries. A systematic development of language awareness is therefore necessary such that these professional writers are also more linguistically sensitised and can better control their writing process. With writing techniques and exercises (Chapter 9), thoughtless routines can be recognised, questioned, and broken up. This can lead to an efficient and effective writing process and ultimately to text products that are suitable for the target audience and that fully exploit their communicative potential.

2 Identifying Good Practices

In a ten-month consultancy project—called the Bank 1 Case—the writing skills of analysts were to be improved such that all communication workflows were more efficient and, in particular, the production of the bank’s quarterly and annual reports was streamlined. At the beginning of the project, the bank’s communication officers had the following view: inconsistent ideas about writing and texts repeatedly led to delays and stress in the flow of information, to miscommunication and non-communication of essential information, and ultimately to higher internal costs. The objective of the bank was to have this problem solved. Hence, the researcher and the stakeholders of the bank drew up a plan for the intervention, which provided for a procedure in five steps: (a) to precisely identify the problem (Sect. 8.2.1), (b) to analyse the current situation (Sect. 8.2.2), (c) to determine the target state and define potential ways to achieve it (Sect. 8.2.3), (d) to imply the most appropriate measures (Chapter 9), and (e) to check what had been achieved (Chapter 10).

Right at the beginning of the project, it became clear that a sustainable solution can only be achieved through mutual learning. In order to include the relevant knowledge of the organisation and the financial analysts, the often hidden knowledge of the organisation had to be found, the so-called tacit knowledge (e.g., Perrin, 2013, p. 201; Polanyi, 1966). This meant that all internal participants, regardless of their hierarchical level, had to be involved in the project right from the start. The main task of the researcher was to steer a process of organisational knowledge transformation: on the one hand to track down and make available the hidden knowledge for the whole organisation, on the other hand to check the acquisition of knowledge and thus the success of the project. The bank as collaboration partner, experienced in organisational consulting, welcomed such an approach as fundamental and complex, but promising.

2.1 Precise Identification of the Problem

Systematic discussions with representatives of all tasks in the document cycling quickly showed that within one and the same organisation there were different and sometimes conflicting ideas about the definition of a successful financial analysis text and how it should be written. Such a diversity of views becomes a problem of an organisation when expectations and competences are not expressed and negotiated but are mostly unspoken and act against each other. And exactly this was the case here.

Analysts want to publish the text as quickly and easily as possible, without further intermediate steps; time pressure is high, and sometimes the time slot from the first keystroke to the publication of the final product is only a few hours short. Therefore, the texts are passed on quickly for the next quality check, performed by the team mates:

• The team colleague, usually the team leader, reads the text, checks it for plausibility and formalities and comments on it.

• If necessary, the analyst changes the text as proposed by the team member before it is forwarded to the copy-editing team.

• The copy-editing team wants to have as much time as possible to read the text carefully and thoroughly, edit it and check it against internal company guidelines before it goes back to the analyst for approval.

• The analyst checks whether the corrections make sense and whether they create added value. Otherwise, the analyst consults the copy-editing team, which sometimes leads to exhausting discussions about formulations. As soon as the text has been approved by copy-editing team and the analyst, it is sent to the layout team.

• In the layout team, the text is prepared for publication. At this point, everybody hopes that there are no more changes of the wording or of the pictures. Any adjustment at this stage can lead to major delays.

• Once ready, the text is sent simultaneously to the financial community and market participants via the appropriate channels, taking into account legal requirements regarding the time of publication (Sect. 5.4.1.1).

As a result of this project phase, five core problems were identified. First, in the document cycling, the skills of the stakeholders, but also their expectations and objectives, were on very different levels; second, most of the stakeholders were little aware of this. Third, the skills, expectations, and objectives could hardly be explicitly and fundamentally negotiated. This led, fourth, to unnecessarily cumbersome processes and, fifth, to text products with inconsistent quality. These five core problems were thus causally connected with each other. Every possible solution required more precise knowledge about who did what exactly in document cycling and why they did it that way.

2.2 Analysing the Current Situation

What is written, how exactly, and why? These are typical initial questions of text production analyses that not only examine finished texts (Chapter 5), but also investigate the context (Chapter 4) and processes (Chapter 6). Such analyses clearly show how the texts are created step by step at the individual workplace. A well-established method of analysis for this is progression analysis (Perrin, 2003), which captures its object on three levels: firstly, the context, i.e., the conditions of action of all participants, such as their expertise, position, and principles (Sect. 8.2.2.1); secondly, action, i.e., insertions or deletions in an emerging text (Sect. 8.2.2.2); and thirdly, the concrete considerations behind it (Sect. 8.2.2.3).

2.2.1 Context

On a first level, the progression analysis captures the environment and context in which a text is created. It should become clear who the participants are, what experience they bring with them, how they work together in principle and what they experience as meaningful. It is not so much a view from the outside as a view from the inside. The researchers try to take the perspective of the participants, of those under investigation. The research framework of ethnography enables this: the researchers become part of the research field, for example, by working in a bank as financial analysts or coaches, and thus, experience what they are investigating. Such phases of immersion are followed by phases of distance in which the impressions from the participating observation are systematically recorded. In addition, the researchers collect important documents such as guidelines to be followed in the workplace and conduct open interviews with the people under investigation in order to sound out their ideas (Chapter 4 and 5). On this first level, progression analysis leads to dense descriptions of a milieu, here the work of financial analysts in a bank.

2.2.2 Process

On a second level, the progression analysis measures exactly what happens during text production at the workplace. Every cursor click, every keystroke, every movement in the room, every conversation with colleagues is recorded at as many workplaces of an institution as possible. If the research focuses on writing processes, the developments in the text are particularly important: What is inserted, deleted, and shifted and when? At what point do the writers work together with whom and in what way? How do they use tools such as printed or digital reference works?—the data recorded in this way enables accurate mapping and reproduction of writing processes. For example, you can see how someone has modified a paragraph in the text or implemented the comments from a colleague’s feedback. The basic linguistic data on this second level are recorded in standardised notation systems for writing processes, for example in S-notation (Fig. 8.1), and can be visualised graphically in representations, such as in a progression graph (Fig. 8.2).

Fig. 8.1

S-notation for the writing process of S3

Fig. 8.2

Progression graph for the writing process of S3

The S-notation (Perrin, 2013, p. 257; Severinson-Eklundh & Kollberg, 1996) shows how a text was created, step by step. Deletion by deletion, insertion by insertion. Passages in square brackets like [Es bleiben … Lager.] were deleted during the writing process, those in curly brackets like Habscheid were inserted separately. Taken together, these insertions and deletions are referred to as revisions. Vertical lines mean jump-off points. At such jump-off points, the writing person S3 has interrupted the linear writing flow to jump to another position in the text, where he or she has then deleted or inserted punctuation, letters, words, or passages. The small numbers at the characters for jump, insert, and delete show the order of these operations. In the shown excerpt, S3 revised her or his existing text by first jumping back from the end of this passage to the beginning and deleting the sentence “Es bleiben … Lager” (Revision 210), then jumping forward and inserting “hin nur” (Revision 211). The S-notation enables precise analyses of the writing activity. In the case of financial analysis texts with hundreds of such revisions, the progression chart provides the researcher with an overview of the writing activity (Fig. 8.2).

The progression chart (Perrin, 2013, p. 262) locates each revision on two axes: the time runs on the x-axis and the text length on the y-axis. Revisions to the left of the graph thus take place earlier in the writing process, revisions to the right happen later; revisions at the top of the graphic concern text passages at the beginning of the finished product, revisions at the bottom concern passages at the end of the text. In the example above (Fig. 8.1), the first revision takes place at the beginning of the writing process and is also at the beginning of the finished text product: the author starts writing and immediately corrects a typo. Therefore, this revision, as a red dot, is mapped on both the x-axis and the y-axis at position 1. This first revision is followed by eleven more, in a row from top left to bottom right. Here, S3 writes linearly and corrects typos continuously. After revision 13 on the x-axis, however, the graph jumps vertically downwards. The jump at this point means that here, between revision 13 and 14, text was inserted later, namely in the period between revision 159 and 233 on the x-axis. The area outlined in blue illustrates how the progression graph shows the multiple editing of text passages: what S3 writes almost linearly with the text between revision 64 and 88 is later revised several times, namely whenever revisions, i.e., red dots, appear within the blue bar, which is limited by revision 64 at the top and 88 at the bottom.

2.2.3 Considerations

The first level of progression analysis has captured the context in which writing takes place, while the second level records what exactly is happening. On the third level, the researchers now discover why the writers do what they do. This is about the considerations behind the decisions that writers have to make on an ongoing basis, on a large and small scale. Large-scale decisions concern, for example, the meaning or goal of the entire text production process, the understanding of the task to be solved, and the planning of resources. Small-scale decisions concern, for example, sentence structure, word choice, and spelling. The field of strategies and practices with which writers control their processes stretches between these poles, partly consciously, partly unconsciously and routinely. What the writers may have considered is revealed in the progression analysis via the methodological tool of the event-based retrospective verbal protocol (Fig. 8.3).

Fig. 8.3

S-notation for revision 180 and retrospective verbal protocol

The event-driven retrospective verbal protocol is created when the writers follow a recording of their writing process on the screen. On its second level, the progression analysis has captured the text formation step by step. These data can be played back as a film of the text creation. On the computer screen, the text then writes itself, so to speak, alone, in real time or time-lapse, exactly as it was created. After the text production is finished, the writers watch this film. The researchers sit there and remind the writers, if necessary, of the working instructions, which read: Comment constantly on what you are doing at this point in the film and why. In this way, it is possible to talk about what the writers can verbalise. These are their conscious reflections on the writing process, their repertoire of conscious strategies and practices (Perrin, 2016). Strategies are expressions of the type I do x to achieve y, or I do x because z applies, whereas practices consist merely of the unfounded activity, that is, I do x. Thus, this third level of progression analysis opens up possible considerations behind the decisions of the writers.

The progression analysis in the case of the Bank 1 has shown that some stakeholders in document cycling can work on texts in such a way that the work meets their own requirements for processes and products and such that it is well received by superiors and other teams in the workflow. Other stakeholders, however, repeatedly came up against their own limits or those of their environment with their processes or products. So, there was a wide dispersion—from writing as an easy and skilful game to writing as agony. It also became clear that some of the solutions and variations found on the jobs were already the seeds for the organisational solutions. Beforehand, however, it had to be worked out what the organisation wanted as a whole.

2.3 Defining the Target State

What is a good text? In order to determine text quality, research and communication practice have developed numerous sets of criteria. The scientific criteria are mainly theoretically based, such as Grice’s conversation maxims (Grice, 1967), which draw on Kant’s four logical functions of the mind and are taken up in the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). Grice’s four conversation maxims consist of: the maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed; the maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence; the maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion, and the maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity (Grice, 1967).

Other catalogues, such as the Hamburg readability model (“Hamburger Verständlichkeitsmodell,” Langer et al., 1974), were developed with test readers or based on considerations from a psycholinguistics (e.g., Groeben, 1972) or text linguistics perspective (Antos & Augst, 1989; Biere, 1991). The four dimensions of comprehensibility according to the Hamburg model include clarity, order, density, and stimulation: texts should be as clear as possible, with simple words and short sentences; they shall be structured as logically and comprehensibly as possible; there needs to be an appropriate balance between scarcity and redundancy, the optimal density; the proportion of stimulants, i.e., elements that offer reading incentives, must be carefully balanced between minimum and maximum. Most other approaches vary or deepen some of these four dimensions, with or without explicit reference to the Hamburg model.

The Christmann comprehensibility catalogue (Christmann & Groeben, 1999, p. 183 ff.), for example, names principles for text design such as linguistic simplicity, semantic brevity or redundancy, cognitive structure, or order and motivational stimulation. Ausubel (1963) deepens on the function of the “Advance Organizer,” a text part that briefly introduces the structure of a text (section) at the beginning and thus shows the addressee the way through the text. An equally early, strongly quantitative strand of comprehensibility research measures word and sentence lengths and calculates a numerical comprehensibility value from them (e.g., Flesch, 1951; McAdams, 1993).

Critical acknowledgements of such applied research on comprehensibility (e.g., Antos et al., 2011; Meutsch, 1989; Werlen et al., 1992) emphasise that the comprehensibility of a text and thus its communicative potential can only be assessed if the complex context is included, such as the prior knowledge of the addressees and the situation in which they receive the text. In other words, there are no patent remedies for comprehensibility per se, but only criteria that apply to certain types of texts in certain situations, for example, financial analysis texts that need to be understood by interested laypersons. The crucial question is whether the addressees can do better what they want to do after having read the text (Sauer, 1995), e.g., whether they can decide and understand how to invest their funds after having read an investment recommendation.

Recent studies show that more and more such catalogues of text features relevant to comprehensibility are still being developed and that even the simplest catalogues are being used in empirical research, such as mathematical formulae of text comprehensibility, (e.g., Schriver, 2009 for professional writing; Loughran & McDonald, 2014 for financial communication). Loughran, for example, defines text comprehensibility as “the effective communication of valuation relevant information” (p. 1645). A 10-K document file is used as the measurement, i.e., a standard annual report as defined by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Loughran explains: “We report that 10-K document file size provides a simple readability proxy that outperforms the Fog Index, does not require document parsing, facilitates replication, and is correlated with alternative readability constructs” (p. 1643).

Regarding the definition of the target state in the Bank 1 Project, the transdisciplinary task now consisted of consultants with a background in financial analysis and applied linguistics and practitioners from different positions and functions jointly formulating quality criteria for the bank’s document cycling, which would henceforth apply to the processes and text products. These criteria should be so solid and flexible at the same time that they could be known, represented, and applied by all employees. Moreover, they should be scalable, i.e., they should be able to cover concrete issues in a similar way, both on a large and small scale. For the text products in the given communication situation, a catalogue of five criteria was worked out: correctness, focus, conventionality, dramaturgy, and audience.

Correctness:

Is it true what it says?—financial analysis texts are not read for entertainment, but as an information basis for often far-reaching decisions. Misinformation can lead to high financial losses. It is therefore crucial that the information is correct. This means that financial analysts, as authors, must open up the right sources, understand the central information correctly and incorporate it into their own texts. The criterion of correctness takes up Grice’s maxim of quality: the addressees of financial analyses must be able to assume that the authors of these texts mean what they communicate.

Focus:

Are the crucial points mentioned?—the addressees ultimately expect an analysis-based recommendation from financial analysis texts. This recommendation should be well-founded, such that it is evident and comprehensible on which information and assessments the analysts rely when they advise certain investments. All this should be in the text—but nothing else. The subject of the text type is therefore narrowly and precisely limited. The criterion of focus takes up Grice’s maxim of relation: the addressees assume that the analysts regard as meaningful what they write in their texts. The Hamburg model speaks here of brevity and conciseness as a limitation to the essential.

Conventionality:

Is the balance right between originality and norm, e.g., in the choice of author positions, style, grammar, punctuation, and spelling? On all these levels and many more, variants are conceivable: own opinions can flow explicitly or implicitly into a text, in elevated or everyday style. Norms such as spelling can be strictly adhered to or deliberately stretched—or they can be violated in the text because the authors are not aware of them. In financial analysis texts, it can be assumed that language standards must be adhered to at various levels, from disclaimer to right spelling. There is little room for personal, peculiar, and stimulating elements in the sense of the Hamburg model.

Dramaturgy:

Do storyline and text logic, reasoning, and arguments fit? Financial analysis texts are more than a collection of information. By interweaving explanatory, argumentative and narrative means and passages, the story is staged. Such dramaturgy requires a well-considered order; in the criterion of dramaturgy, Grice’s maxim of manner and Hamburg’s concept of structuring and order thus resonate. Ausubel’s advance organiser can contribute to functional dramaturgy.

Audience:

Is the audience addressed? Financial analysis texts are aimed at addressees who would not be in a position to carry out such an analysis themselves, but who need the texts to take informed decisions. Ideally, the communicative means, such as language and layout, are chosen in a way that the target readers feel addressed by the text in the given communication situation. The criterion of the target audience includes what Grice’s maxim of quantity requires: to be as informative as one possibly can, and to give as much information as is needed. Such a criterion is contained in most recent catalogues of features of comprehensibility, such as Schriver’s “target group perspective” (Schriver, 2009).

These five criteria have a direct relation to the text product: if the final text is compared with the world it reports on, it can be checked whether the information is correct and pivotal, whether the dramaturgy makes sense, and whether the language corresponds to certain norms or not. However, a text could fulfil all these criteria and still not be a of any use—because it has been produced with far too many resources and detours. When it comes to writing, too, the ratio of effort and yield must be beneficial, and this, again scaling, for the individual authors, for those involved in document cycling, and for the bank as a company and institution.

If the production processes for texts are too complex, and therefore, texts are not finished in time, this has consequences for all stakeholders. Hence, the ideal of a good text cannot just be about the product; criteria need to be defined for the processes as well. These process-oriented criteria focus on the way in which the texts are produced and on the amount of resources, such as time, that are required to produce them. A simple but central procedural quality criterion in professional text production is adherence to deadlines: if the sub-processes are completed within the planned time, the workflow is easier to control. Other criteria relate to contexts, such as the appropriate use of digital writing technologies in the workplace or coordinated collaboration with colleagues.

In transdisciplinary collaboration, the goal cannot be to evaluate performance against fixed standards. Rather, the framework of collaborating across fields and domains offers the chance of jointly developing and negotiating theoretically and practically grounded and functional standards. Ideally, this is done both between various stakeholders within the organisation itself—and, in a wider scope, between researchers and practitioners. Such negotiation necessitates an ongoing discourse about text quality and the measures and working techniques that are necessary to achieve this quality.

3 Designing Working Techniques

The transdisciplinary projects that are referred to in this book show that experienced writers—employees who were able to write well and easily—worked with certain techniques, consciously or unconsciously (Sects. 8.3.1–8.3.4). They used the techniques to achieve more with less effort, i.e., to compose better texts in a shorter time and without costly detours in accordance with the criteria formulated above. The next task in the case of the Bank 1, as in many other similar projects, was to work out such techniques, describe them as prototypes of good practices in a way that was easy to understand, and thus make them available to the stakeholders involved.

In the consulting phase of the Bank 1 case, certain techniques have proven to be particularly target-oriented and transferable at the same time. Targeted-oriented because they are suitable for implementing quality concepts such as those formulated above (Sect. 8.2); transferable because writers can easily acquire these techniques to sharpen their language awareness and thereby improve their text production processes and text products. The Mugging Test is an example for techniques that help find the main theme of the text (Sect. 8.3.1); the Finger Technique is an example for techniques that help plan the text (Sect. 8.3.2); the Stages Technique is an example for techniques that enable to stay in the writing flow (Sect. 8.3.3); and the Bonsai Technique as well as the Re-explaining Test are examples for techniques that help rethink the text product (Sect. 8.3.4). All the techniques can be watched on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nopkDWd20yg&list=PLMRq-Vj43RujHxhB1WMhdcZJUUKFAyiAb.

3.1 Finding the Main Theme: Mugging Test

Writing techniques such as the Mugging Test (Perrin, 2013, p. 130) were used by experienced writers in projects such as the Bank 1 in order to find the main theme and the core message before writing (e.g., Appendix B, statement 064). Writing research has shown that prudent planning is one of the good practices of experienced writers: if experienced authors have a lot of time to write, for example, if they can work on the same text for several days, they start early to write down their thoughts and to reflect and ponder on them. Overnight, they gain distance from what has been written before and they can read it again the next day with fresh eyes. But if they have little time, for example, two hours for a financial analysis text, they decide on the main theme before they start writing; they know that there is hardly any time for fundamental changes, so the basics for the whole text must be right before time can be spent on rephrasing sentences and finding more accurate words. In these cases, when the writer has only little time, the Mugging Test helps (Fig. 8.4).

Fig. 8.4

Mugging test

3.2 Planning the Text: Finger Technique

The Finger Technique (Perrin, 2013, p. 131) is also particularly effective for writing projects that have to be performed in a short time. It helps to roughly mark out the way to the goal before even starting to write (e.g., Appendix B, statement 126). Using the Finger Technique allows the writers to imagine the structure of the finished text and the stages of the writing process even before the first key stroke on the keyboard. This increases the chance that the time spent on detailed text work such as individual formulations is worthwhile. In contrast, missing or wrong planning can necessitate that elaborately formulated and revised passages have to be deleted in the course of the writing process or in the end. The data from projects such as the Bank 1 shows that experienced writers usually reflect on how to stage the story before writing, i.e., how to put the main arguments of their analysis into a coherent story (Fig. 8.5).

Fig. 8.5

Finger technique

3.3 Staying in the Writing Flow: Stages Technique

Once the destination and direction have been defined, the writing needs to gain momentum and flow—in other words, authors need to formulate their text while being and staying in the writing flow (e.g., Appendix B, statement 144). Aligning, planning, or revising a text requires different mental resources than formulating a text: they take place on the meta-level of writing, from a distance, in the writer’s mind. The actual writing, however, is performed in a rhythm of continuous decision-making and textual implementation. The focus of attention scales flexibly from large to small and back: in the flow of writing, the writer keeps the main message in mind as well as the stylistic details. Bringing oneself into this mental state of writing flow requires cognitive resources. Once, the state has been reached, it is worth staying there until a text or part of it has been formulated in a first draft. A technique that helps stay in the writing flow is the Stages Technique (Perrin, 2013, p. 270). Experienced writers often apply this technique because it is consciously or unconsciously clear to them that it takes too much energy to repeatedly get into and out of the flow of writing (Fig. 8.6).

Fig. 8.6

Stages technique

3.4 Rethinking the Text Product: Bonsai Technique, Re-explaining Test, and Typo Test

How to revise? The next three techniques show how experienced writers such as in the Bank 1 can further develop their own initial text drafts or review and edit the texts of others. In all three techniques, the distance to the written text is important. What is written should enable the addressees to understand what the authors intend to say. This means that the authors must be able to read their texts through the eyes of the addressees when they rethink the text product—this requires mental and social resources. In the Bonsai Technique (Fig. 8.7; Whitehouse 2019, p. 100), experienced writers ask themselves in each passage whether it is of use to the addressees and whether the text would lack anything if a word, a sentence, a passage were deleted (e.g., Appendix B, statement 018). In the Re-explaining Test (Perrin, 2013, p. 271) (Fig. 8.8), test readers are given a chance and show what a text can achieve (e.g., Appendix B, statement 180). Finally, the Typo Test (Perrin, 2013, p. 271) (Fig. 8.9) is used by experienced writers when they want to read the text with fresh eyes after struggling with their thoughts and text fragments on the screen (e.g., Appendix B, statement 041).

Fig. 8.7

Bonsai technique

Fig. 8.8

Re-explaining test

Fig. 8.9

Typo test

4 Interim Conclusion

Neither financial journalists nor rating agencies, let alone investors themselves are able to make up for what financial analysts missed when writing their investment recommendations (Sect. 8.1). The solution hence has to be embodied where the texts originate. This calls for the definition of target reader groups, better institutional conditions in document cycling as a top-down measure (Sect. 8.1.1) and, bottom-up, for the development of language awareness and writing techniques among financial analysts (Sect. 8.1.2).

Before changing communication practices in an organisation, it is crucial to scrutinise and identify good practices and skills (Sect. 8.2). They may already exist, but they may not have been discussed because they were hidden in the implicit as tacit knowledge. Diagnostic methods, such as progression analysis, are suitable for tracking down such knowledge and making it tangible. The progression analysis has shown, for example, that some analysts at the Bank 1 were struggling with the writing task whereas some analysts were able to write their text contributions with little effort in such a way that production went according to plan and the texts were well received by the addressees.

From good practices and research-based findings, working techniques as well as further complementing measures can be derived and designed (Sect. 8.3). Such techniques are evident in experienced authors’ writing competence and behaviour. These writers differ from less experienced writers in the ability to use the appropriate techniques in different writing situations and thus to design the writing process and the resulting text product to suit the task. This ability was to be promoted in the project Bank 1 among all writers. In order to do this, the tacit knowledge had to be detected, made explicit and available to the entire organisation in appropriate interventions.