How to Write for an Enigma

By Robert Walker Cohen

“Know your audience,” goes the old quip.

When you can’t know your audience? Take a risk.

This challenge most often arises in specialized projects targeting small, exclusive, and/or emergent sets of readers. The problem extends to writing-related contexts, such as direct sales or legal work.

Investor relations, fundraising, cutting-edge tech, high-ticket B2B sales, grant writing, and court memos all may include a component of writing for an enigmatic reader. Degrees of obscurity will vary.

When engaging with a mystery, you’ll first want to manage your risk. Here’s how I think about this:

1. Find out what you can. If other writers have written to this audience before, even if only very few (common with emerging tech) — study their work, study the audience reaction, and study any data points in the exchange that may be revealing.

2. Make plausible assumptions. Once you’ve gathered the available data, you can begin to make assumptions about the intended reader, their level of sophistication, the type of tone or voice they may appreciate, etc.

3. Check with reliable sources. Typically — though not always — you will want to verify your assumptions with team members, leadership, or others with a degree of experience engaging with the intended audience. This can save you a lot of time, and crucially, is an easy way to prevent errors or faux pas.

4. Decide a plan. You will want to collate the results from the above steps into an action plan. This internal synthesis does not need to be highly polished or presentable; it only needs to make sense and be actionable. Raw notes that only you can decipher are sufficient at this stage, though in team-oriented or longer-term projects, some legibility will be appreciated by your colleagues (or even future-you). I personally prefer nicely arranged pre-project notes, but the reality is that your pursuit of polished clarity and precision can be saved for your draft.

Concluding caveat — I’ve found that unless the client specifically asks otherwise, or you’re working on a personal creative project, it’s best to hedge conservatively with your first attempt at speaking to an obscure audience. You can save your more unconventional ideas for when you are more familiar with them. That is, if you discover your mystery audience is receptive to the unconventional to begin with.

The reality is that while we can manage our risk, we can’t know an enigma until they read what we have to say.

You must take a leap.

Manage your risk poorly: Shark-infested waters.

Manage your risk well: Silk luxury linens.

The Buffett Letters, Part I: Introduction

By Robert Walker Cohen

Warren Buffett does more than move markets with his capital. He moves them with his words.

When Buffett has something to say, the world’s market movers do more than listen. They take note and they take action.

Markets may move. Valuations may change. Fortunes may rise or fall.

Today’s blog is the first of a series examining Buffett’s communication strategies and tactics, leveraging the vehicle of his essays and thought leadership. Buffett’s famous — and famously anticipated — annual shareholder letters have been nothing less than the beating heart of his communication strategy, and will be central to this series.

Buffett’s annual letters are more than thought leadership. They are industry leadership. They are often considered market and even macroeconomic bellwethers.

For those of us in the field, they serve as a kind of “gold standard” as to what the best thought leadership and executive communications can accomplish.

Buffett’s impact, longevity, and consistency make him a contender for one of the greatest corporate communicators of all time. While his investing record (alongside his inextricable partner, Charlie Munger) is undisputed, there is equally much to learn from how he manages thought leadership, investor relations, and public perception.

From a branding and messaging perspective, he has ingeniously incorporated his communication strategy into his investing strategy such that they are mutually supportive and holistically intertwined.

At times, it can be hard to tell where the communication strategy ends and the investing strategy begins. This is part of its genius. It feels natural, authentic, and trustworthy. In a highly complex industry, which most do not understand at best or are highly suspicious of at worst, Buffett appears to exemplify honesty, sincerity, and conscientiousness.

His persona and brand identity are conscious, intentional, and have been refined over the decades, and crucially, appear nearly interchangeable with his results and his product, as he once remarked —

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

To extract the best lessons from decades of his writing, we have to look at his work holistically. There is an equal amount to learn from Charlie Munger, of course — and much from the broader Berkshire Hathaway ecosystem supporting Buffett and Munger — but I believe Munger and Berkshire deserve their own separate analyses and I plan to do so in time.

In terms of how I plan to approach this series, my primary source will be “The Essays of Warren Buffett,” an arrangement of Buffett’s best essays that have been curated by Lawrence Cunningham.

Buffett himself has remarked of the collection —

“The best book representing our views. If I were to pick one book to read, this would be the one.”

Cunningham’s arrangement organizes Buffett’s writings by subject rather than chronology so as to convey the most essential components of Buffett’s approach and to be organized for readers to peruse the topics they are most interested in learning about. For my purposes, this is both convenient and functional as it provides a great field guide to the vast Buffett corpus and allows the readers that join me on this journey to examine Buffett’s communication strategy, style, and tactics across a diverse range of critical subjects in finance and corporate life.

While Cunningham’s arrangement will be my primary source, I may also choose to review and analyze certain shareholder letters or other essays that are especially relevant for the purposes of this series.

The next post in this series will cover a lesser-known short essay of Buffett’s concerning the art of writing, published as the preface to “A Plain English Handbook,” the SEC’s writing manual. Stay tuned.

Respecting Your Readers, Part I: Time

By Robert Walker Cohen

Time is finite. Attention, more so.

Respect your reader’s time. Consciously or not, they appreciate the gesture.

Write what is necessary. Cut what is extraneous. Concision is an art unto itself.

This post is short — intentionally so.

Fund Commentary Fundamentals

By Robert Walker Cohen

Fund commentaries are essential for compliance and investor relations purposes. For financial writers, when creative instincts clash with rigid institutional mandates, they can also be a source of friction.

For the uninitiated or the newly, I’ve written a set of fundamentals that junior writers have found useful —

1. Don’t stand out. Commentaries are not meant to be bright and shiny objects. They exist for compliance and investor relations purposes. It’s essential to study past commentaries of a given institution and pay careful attention to tone, word count, word choice, and various other hallmarks that are more or less “baked in.” These expectations may be unspoken by management, but you must ensure that your commentary does not deviate much from the protocol. If you do, you may find yourself with an unhappy compliance headache. Financial writers who can set aside their egos and quickly adapt to a fund’s protocols and traditions will save a lot of time in terms of revisions and avoid compliance issues.

Crucially, this also applies to understanding a fund’s spreadsheets—any fund commentator will need to ensure they understand their employer’s particular way of formatting and presenting fund data.

2. The story can be more than meets the eye. For example, a well-known stock may see a sharp drop despite reporting quality earnings, growth projections, and broader industry optimism. In this case, it can help to read past commentaries, media reports, or other analyst reports related to the stock or the broader industry.

A commentary writer may learn something unexpected, such as that the entire industry appears to be going in a certain direction while the seemingly well-performing stock is going against the grain. Or, that the price had been too high to begin with due to analyst hopes for a given initiative—and the initiative was frustrated, for whatever reason, dashing their hopes. Writing fund commentaries can entail a lot of dot-connecting in such cases.

3. Some equities are easy to research, others are not. This is especially the case when completing monthly reports on lesser-known companies that are rarely in the news. They tend to live outside the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq and are often found in the Russell or the Dow. That said, it may surprise many to know that even most S&P and Nasdaq listings are only sporadically covered by industry publications. It’s occasionally necessary to cover the movements of such an equity in a fund commentary due to a dramatic movement.   

Often, the most recent quarterly earnings report can provide some guidance. But once in a while—such as in the case of a positive earnings report followed by a sharp dive only two months later—even this does not offer any hints as to why a stock moved as it did. When required to explain such a mystery without much information at hand, keep the following strategies in mind:

A. Research comparable peers: Look closely at similar companies within an industry vertical, or analyze the vertical itself.

B. Zoom out to macro trends: You will likely discover that a broader macroeconomic or sector trend happened to move an entire basket of interrelated stocks.

C. Leverage industry journals: Broad trends are much easier to research than the isolated movements of individual stocks. They can reliably be found reported in industry journals or other outlets, offering an entirely plausible argument as to why a particular stock moved in a strange direction.

The fun part of fund commentary is that it can sometimes feel a bit like uncovering a mystery or piecing together a complicated puzzle.

I conclude with an apt quote from David Coleman, the President of The College Board, that I believe applies well to the art of the fund commentary:

"Read like a detective and write like a conscientious investigative reporter."

When we do this well, we don't only satisfy compliance. We provide investors with the clarity they deserve.

What is “Prompt Engineering,” Really?

By Robert Walker Cohen

The AI-savvy have mostly moved on from prompt engineering and onto agents. For the masses, different story.

According to Google Trends, the term is catching fire. An uptick began over the summer and has only gained steam since, hitting several new peaks — including an all-time high just six weeks ago.

My hypothesis is that this is driven by the rapid, wildfire-like adoption of AI in the workplace. Across global corporate offices, AI is achieving mass adoption and ubiquity. Humans are curious, and like to improve, so they can be expected to naturally wander into prompt engineering. Ever-more curious youth, at university or high school, have likely ventured down their own prompting rabbit holes. It’s hard to imagine a white collar professional or student today not prompting an AI model at some point during the workday, whether for search, ideation, feedback, or some random MacGyver.

I’m not a fan of the term “prompt engineering,” as it makes out a relatively simple activity to be more technical and complicated than it actually is. Often, posts of prompts that gain some measure of virality or widespread use tend to be walls of text that intimidate non-technical or casual AI users. The complexity can be a point unto itself, rather than any real utility.

I’ve written complex AI prompts of my own and found the results to be valuable and useful, so I’m not opposed to the idea of writing a detailed prompt even if I do oppose unnecessary complexity and obscurantism.

In fact, I embrace detailed prompt writing. Writing a lengthy and specific prompt can be helpful for the prompter, as it forces clear thinking and articulation of the required outcome. Where I object, is referring to this as “engineering,” as if it is a technical skill that requires a university education.

Nothing is being engineered. Only clarified, to produce a specific and desired output. Anyone can do this.

A better term than prompt engineering, less intimidating and more casual friendly, may simply be — “Detailed prompting.”

Engineering requires a degree. It denotes exclusivity.

Simply being detailed does not. It’s a decision, available to all of us. As with writing, it starts with understanding exactly what it is that you want to say.

“Put it in Writing.”

By Robert Walker Cohen

Writing can be spontaneous. Serious writing cannot.

Serious writing demands clarity of thought. It creates structure for nebulous ideas, vague commentary, and disembodied facts.

There’s something inherently delightful about serious writing, akin to organizing a cluttered office until every item is in its rightful place.

The expression “put it in writing” implies this. A thought is neither tangible nor real, only a fleeting possibility, until it is frozen in the amber of the written word.

The substance of publication dictates the weight of the words. The act of publishing a piece of writing under the title of “author” bears far more meaning than an email does, for example, while both greatly supercede a verbal agreement.

The more substantive the medium, the more real the idea becomes. Even a constitution is nothing more than a structure of ideas.

Authored words, widely accepted, can birth an empire.

What is the Value of an Idea?

By Robert Walker Cohen

Introducing, a perennial debate:

“All great things begin with an idea.” vs. “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.”

The rhetorical impasse between the ideators and the executors is far from settled. Anyone that has an opinion on this will insist strongly that they are right, and give little credence to the opposing argument.

AI has introduced a new wrinkle into this contest. Ideas and creativity can now be generated instantaneously, and for those in search of the correct idea it can seem that judgment and taste are more important than imagination.

This modification mostly affects the ideators rather than the executors. Judgment and selection do require imagination and creative insight. The professional needs to be able to imagine the various alternatives and their workability, or to improvise from a presented idea set based on their cultivated expertise and understanding of the bigger-picture.

That said, the essence of the debate remains relevant today and may be presented as:

“Is it more important to ideate or to execute?”

Let’s steel-man each argument, using the metaphor of launching a manned rocket to Pluto.

THE IDEATOR

Steel-man: “If you can execute a long-distance flight to Pluto without any creative ideation beforehand, you may be guaranteed to fly but you are also guaranteed to never have the vision or strategic purpose to leave orbit to begin with. Your perfectly tuned rocket ship, rusting in a hangar.”

THE EXECUTOR

Steel-man: “If you ideate your trip to Pluto and you don’t have a properly engineered rocket, you won’t even be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. If you can’t execute and operationalize your flight to Pluto, all you have is a fancy idea and a whiteboard, nothing more.”

For me, both steel-men are completely wrong. Each argument has a silent-yet-catastrophic black hole at its center.

They are also both each correct, in their own way.

To explain —

The voyage to Pluto requires both visionary ideation and airtight execution. Ideators are needed to ensure that a strategic creative vision can drive the grand endeavor to liftoff, while the executors are essential to the ship’s bidirectional flight path across vast expanses of empty space.

Therefore, the ideator and executor are each right to insist on their importance to the mission.

Where they are wrong, is to denigrate the contribution of the other.

It is neither true that “great ideas are everything,” nor that “execution is everything.”

Both assumptions are lazy thinking. The reality is that ideas and execution are each inextricable from a broader whole.

To conclude, exiting Pluto’s orbit and applying an Earthly metaphor —

Having a great idea is like planting a healthy seed in a pot of soil on the window sill, where it can receive plenty of sunlight. This, on its own, is not enough.

Executing effectively requires that the seed must be nurtured, with daily watering, monitoring, protecting, and applying of the necessary nutrients, otherwise it will never grow. This, on its own, without a healthy seed, soil, or proper environment, is also not enough.

The value of an idea, then, is equivalent to the value of its execution.

The value of execution, therefore, is also equivalent to the value of the idea.

In other words, “The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.”

Deciphering the Jargoneer

By Robert Walker Cohen   

In the world of professional writing, there are few greater impasses than that of a writer armed with a red pen and a client deeply in love with their own industry jargon.

For professional writers to continue to be their client’s best option, they need to do two things: create differentiated value and ensure a seamless client experience.

Navigating the jargon-heavy client can be the ultimate test of both.

For the skilled writer, an over-reliance on jargon creates linguistic "toxic waste" that suffocates effective prose. But for a very specific type of highly specialized client, jargon is their native tongue.

To affectionately—and a little ironically—refer to these clients, many of whom are brilliant innovators and good friends, I will resurrect an ancient 17th-century jargon artifact: “jargoneers.”

Jargoneers exist in every field. The more specialized the industry, the more obvious they are to outsiders.

Now, let’s begin to untangle this puzzle — the mismatch between the jargoneer client and the professional writer — with Merriam-Webster’s three definitions of “jargon”:

1. the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group

2. obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words

3. confused unintelligible language; a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialect

Merriam-Webster is considered a neutral source, but here, they reveal their writerly biases. You will notice that each definition is progressively more negative. It’s as if the first definition belongs to the jargoneer, the second to the professional writer, and the third to the annoyed outsider.

The disconnect is dramatic. By way of example, here’s an anonymized startup pitch from a classic jargoneer:

“(Anonymous startup) is building vertically-integrated AI infrastructure to unlock the key challenges in DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) networks today... creating the world's first AI-native blockchain... that effectively coordinates resources such as models, compute, and data across edge devices.”

If you did not enjoy reading this and found it difficult to understand exactly what is being pitched, you aren't alone. The jargoneer who wrote it, tragically, may be entirely enamored.

My theory on the disconnect:

Jargon is undoubtedly useful as an effective shorthand for conveying complex ideas to a niche audience. But that utility alone doesn't explain why jargoneers love jargon as much as they do, far beyond its actual usefulness.

The reality is that jargoneers love jargon because it acts as a social signal. It demonstrates a baseline savvy, hard-won domain expertise, and proud membership in an exclusive tribe of Those In The Know. To outsiders, however, the jargoneer can be uncharitably perceived as someone convinced that the more syllables they use, the higher they will fly—occasionally bordering on unwitting parody.

In defense of the jargoneers, they are right to be proud. It takes a high degree of intelligence and years of hard work to master these complex dialects. Jargon is often a side-effect of true expertise, and that should be commended.

That said, leaning too heavily on insider language actively undermines the messenger, branding their groundbreaking ideas as convoluted and their personalities as pretentious.

Professional writers aim to craft storytelling that is compelling, clear, and precise. Jargon is a threat to this mission, a tool that should be wielded by a skilled writer only when strictly necessary.

To return to the anonymous startup, here is how a writer may remodel their pitch to be punchy, accessible, and jargon-free:

“(Anonymous startup) is building AI infrastructure that coordinates and optimizes existing physical networks.”

Much cleaner, no?

Bridging the Gap

If a jargoneer contracts a writer, how do we untangle the knot?

Here’s my formula:

1. Study the Client: It’s the writer’s responsibility to understand the client's baseline voice, their industry context, and the "why" behind their communication style.
   

2. Address the Friction: Upon discovering the client is a jargoneer, the writer must politely—but firmly—point out where their specialized language is muddying the waters. Advocate for clarity and agree on a style that is natural and resonant.
   

3. Navigate the Compromise: If they accept the expert advice, perfect. Problem solved. If a well-meaning jargoneer clings to their jargon, the writer must chart the course on an ad-hoc basis, aware that this engagement will likely require a healthy dose of strategic managing.
   

While jargoneers and writers may seem like a tragic mismatch, the reality is that they are made for one another. The highly specialized client needs a professional writer more than most, and the professional writer needs reliable and engaging client work.

If a brilliant jargoneer and an expert writer can develop a healthy, honest, and collaborative dynamic, both stand to win big.

Choose Your Words, Carefully.

By Robert Walker Cohen

I once asked a master chef: “What’s your secret?”

She whispered: “The ingredients are half the battle.”

The same is true of writing. Half the battle is word choice.

Words do more than signify meaning. They convey connotations, aesthetics, affinities, rhythm, and cultural context.

This also applies to speaking. The written word, however, is more fixed, immutable, and self-conscious. It carries greater weight.

Here’s a mundane example —

“Free for dinner tonight?” vs. “Would you like to have dinner tonight?”

Both questions are identical. Person A writes Person B to ask to share a meal. Regardless, the subtle differences are significant.

“Free for dinner tonight?” is casual. It implies familiarity, friendliness, and takes for granted that the responder would be happy to go for dinner with the questioner if they had the time. The lack of 1st/2nd person pronouns — “I,” “You,” etc. — makes the request lower-stakes and, at face value, inconsequential if rejected.

“Would you like to have dinner tonight?” is respectful. The use of “would you like to” establishes the question as a polite request contingent on the desire of the responder. This implies either less familiarity than in the first case, or, at least, a conscientious personality on the part of the questioner.

When you next dash off a quick note to a boss or a coworker — pause, and consider your word choice.