I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
The video course “Writing about numbers” that I co-created is available from The School of unProfessional Writing.
The course covers topics such as
Check it out at d.pr/hSAusx
Step 5 is fix the line length so that it is about 65 to 75 characters wide. Do it by widening margins and increasing font size. If you know how to change line spacing, set the body text to have line spacing of 120% or 130%. You’ve created white space and made the text readable So that was my 5-step process: Step 1: delete unnecessary paragraphs and sentences. Step 2: make sure the bottom line is up front.
Step 4 is to remove adverbs and adjectives from what remains of your original draft. Use stronger verbs and nouns instead. Instead of checked carefully write scrutinised. You can find many of them by searching for “ly “. Better than that, there are various writing apps and web services that are better at highlighting the syntax in text, such as iA Writer and Hemingway Editor.
Step 3 is rewriting passive sentences into active ones. Or most of them, at least. You want sentences that are subject-verb-object. Not “25 invoices were tested” but “we tested 25 invoices.” Searching your text for “was” and “were” can help find your passive sentences. Also search for “It is” and “it was” and rewrite sentences that begin with those phrases. They are dummy subjects so change those sentences to start with the actual subject.
This week I am going to release 5 short videos explaining how you can take one of your reports and make it more effective. Each day will be one step of a 5-step process. Step 1 was to cut out unnecessary paragraphs and sentences. Step 2 is to ensure bottom line is up front. The reader needs to know what the document is about. In just a sentence or two.
This week I am going to release 5 short videos explaining how you can take one of your reports and make it more effective.
Each day will be one step of a 5-step process.
Step 1 is to cut out unnecessary paragraphs and sentences.
That means use a chainsaw not a scalpel.
A good place to look for unnecessary words is the opening. Often there is more background and context than the reader needs. They may need only 1 or 2 sentences to tell them what the report is about.
If you can’t bear to lose the words, keep the first draft for posterity and create a duplicate. Then edit the duplicate.
When newspapers first moved online longer articles ran over multiple webpages and readers had to click to move to the second and later pages. Most readers didn’t click. Journalists learned something they couldn’t know when newspapers were on paper: that most of the words they wrote, words they were proud of, were never seen by readers. Online articles are now shorter—on one page—and written in short paragraphs. Often paragraphs have only one sentence.
Have you ever received an email asking for a document, someone’s phone number, some suggested dates for a meeting, and your thoughts on a current issue? Emails like that are hard to respond to. You likely don’t have all the information to hand, so you end up replying multiple times. And maybe some of the requests never get answered. The message thread quickly becomes confusing and working out which questions have been answered and which haven’t is a challenge to both the sender and the receiver.
Do you ever think about how to include numbers in your writing in order to achieve your desired goal. I don’t just mean whether to use numerals or write the number as words. I mean aspects like consistency, formatting, precision, and position. All of these things can help or hinder the communication of information to your reader. If you are an auditor or accountant I suspect most of the things you write have at least one number in.
“You’re a unicorn.” That’s what Colleen Trolove said to me because I am someone who’s as comfortable with numbers as he is with words. And that’s why I’ve recorded a set of videos for the @school to show you how to write about numbers. What topics does the course cover? ✅ How to deal with technical financial terms and jargon ✅ How to put numbers into text to create the emphasis you want