I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
There are lots of reasons you should avoid bullet point lists in your presentation slide decks. When you create a new deck you can, of course, avoid creating them. But what can you do if you already have slide decks that are basically one bullet point slide after another? One way is to put each bullet point onto a separate slide along with an image or chart or other illustration.
That’s my key takeaway from listening to this this episode of the Fixable podcast. The podcast features Todd Rogers, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who is a co-author of Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. During the conversation with the podcast hosts, Todd explained six research-backed principles for effective writing that are in the book. These are: Use fewer words Lower the reading level Use formatting judiciously Make the purpose clear for skimmers Emphasise value for readers Make responding as easy as possible.
๐ง๐ฒ๐น๐น ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐บ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ผ ๐ธ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ ๐๐ผ ๐๐ฎ๐. I wish I had actually written this sentence. Norman Marks wrote it as a comment on a LinkedIn post about writing internal audit reports. Keep it at the front of your mind whenever you start to write something, whether an internal report, an email, a sales proposal or even a LinkedIn post.
Unless:ย ๐ Itโs a good joke ๐ and you are good at telling jokes. Therefore, for most of us: no jokes. There is another serious reason not to start with a joke. The primacy-recency effect means your audience are more likely to remember the beginning and end of your presentation than the important bit in the middle. Do you want them to remember your joke or your message? Instead of a joke, therefore, I suggest you start your presentation with a promise.
Here are seven things to do when creating and delivering a finance presentation to make sure it’s a success. Chastity. Be confident but donโt be a show-off. That can be a fine line to tread. The main thing is to remember that you are there for the audience, not the other way around. Temperance. Show restraint in the content of your presentation. Donโt include material you donโt need to tell your story.
Here are seven things to avoid when giving a finance presentation. Pride. Itโs not about you. Your presentation is for your audience and what they want/need should be uppermost in your mind Greed. Stay within your allotted time. This is doubly-true if you are part of a conference panel or similar because exceeding your share of the time will take time away from the other presenters.
One way you can declutter and simplify your writing (whether it is a quick email or a full-scale report) is to use hyperlinks to supporting material. The problem is that URLs to webpages and so on are not usually short or user friendly. It is possible to use a URL shortening service like Bitly to get a shorter URL and, if you pay, you might get something that is customised to your organisation.
On LinkedIn there are 202,622 people (including me) who follow the hashtag #accounting but it seems there are no posts that use the hashtag. Until I wrote one today. Hello to the other 202,621 people. I’m a Chartered Public Finance Accountant (CPFA). I post sometimes about #PublicFinancialManagement but mostly I post advice for accountants to improve their writing and presentation skills. This is because I think that accounting is about words more than numbers and the accountants who will be most successful are the ones who can communicate their insights to their colleagues and clients.
As a newly-qualified accountant I took a time management course. It still helps me today. One part of it was how to deal with incoming post. I learned there were four things you could do with an incoming item of post. They were, in descending order of preference: throw it in the bin, delegate it to someone, file it, or act on it. Over the decades since I took that course post has been replaced by email and I receive far more email messages every day than I ever had letters.
On LinkedIn there are 202,622 people (including me) who follow the hashtag #accounting but it seems there are no posts that use the hashtag. Until I wrote one today. Hello to the other 202,621 people. I’m a Chartered Public Finance Accountant (CPFA). I post sometimes about #PublicFinancialManagement but mostly I post advice for accountants to improve their writing and presentation skills. This is because I think that accounting is about words more than numbers and the accountants who will be most successful are the ones who can communicate their insights to their colleagues and clients.