Rof Writing Style

---
name: rof-writing-style
description: Use when revising a Review of Finance manuscript for a 150-word abstract, double-blind wording, Chicago-style references, first-order finance framing, two-round review discipline, and 60-page total manuscript constraint.
---

# 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.

## 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

```text
[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>
```