Jf Writing Style

---
name: jf-writing-style
description: Use when polishing the prose of a The Journal of Finance (JF) manuscript for accessible, general-interest exposition. Tightens writing and framing; it does not change results or run analyses.
---

# Writing Style & Exposition (jf-writing-style)

## When to trigger

- The introduction does not deliver the question, finding, and magnitude in the first page
- Prose is dense, jargon-heavy, or written for a subfield rather than the broad AFA reader
- The main finding is buried; the reader has to work to extract the takeaway
- Sentences hedge so much the claim disappears

## JF house voice: accessible, precise, general-interest

JF is the **AFA flagship**, read across asset pricing, corporate finance, banking, microstructure, and household finance by 8,000+ readers. Writing must be **accessible to a finance reader outside your subfield** while staying precise. The manuscript also faces a **60-page limit** (≥1.5 spacing, 12-pt font), so lead with economics and **offload technical depth to the Internet Appendix** (bundled at the end of the same PDF; see `jf-internet-appendix`) rather than padding the body.

## The JF introduction (first ~3 pages do the work)

In order: (1) **the question and why it matters** — general-interest, concrete; (2) **what you do** — design/data/test in plain terms; (3) **what you find** — headline result with its **economic magnitude** in interpretable units; (4) **why it is credible** — the source of variation or the test; (5) **contribution** — the closest papers and your delta (see `jf-literature-positioning`); (6) brief roadmap. A reader who stops at page 3 should know the question, the answer, its size, and why to believe it.

## Sentence-level discipline

- Active voice and short declaratives for main claims.
- State magnitudes in interpretable units (bps, % of market cap, Sharpe gain), not only t-stats.
- Define notation once; do not re-derive in prose what a table shows.
- Cut hedging stacks to one calibrated claim.
- Use "significant" for economic importance, not as a synonym for the p-value.

## Checklist

- [ ] Question, finding, and economic magnitude in the first ~3 pages
- [ ] Headline number in interpretable economic units
- [ ] A non-specialist finance reader could follow the introduction
- [ ] Heavy notation/derivation moved to the Internet Appendix, keeping the body ≤60 pages
- [ ] Active voice; calibrated (not reflexive) hedging
- [ ] Abstract matches the introduction's claims

## Anti-patterns

- Opening with three paragraphs of literature before the question
- Reporting "significant at the 1% level" as if it were the finding
- Subfield jargon with no plain-language gloss for the broad AFA reader
- Padding the body toward the 60-page cap instead of using the Internet Appendix
- Over-hedged claims that blur the contribution

## Output format

```
【Question+finding+magnitude in first 3 pp?】yes / no
【Magnitude in economic units?】yes / no
【Accessible to non-specialist?】yes / no
【Notation moved to Internet Appendix?】yes / no
【Body ≤60 pp / hedging trimmed?】yes / no
【Next step】jf-submission
```