But that doesn’t mean that accountants should not improve their writing skills. Accounting is about words as well as numbers. All that classifying and analysing of financial data is pointless if its meaning is not communicated. That’s why I keep writing posts about the need for accountants to be better at writing and presenting. Somehow, we’ve gone from the time when people complained about predictive text because it caused them to send an offensive word to their boss to a situation where people are looking to “write” 2,000 word documents with it.

Continue reading →

Last year a colleague sent me a photo he took during a presentation. The presenter had a slide with a stacked column chart with 24 columns of data that filled the whole slide. The legend was too small to read. Overlaying the central part of column chart was a white box with a pie chart in it. There was an arrow pointing to one of the columns because, I infer, this pie chart was showing in a circle the same analysis of composition as the column.

Continue reading →

Improve your presentations with one simple tactic. You’ve probably heard that you should use storytelling in your presentations but do you know how to do that? Especially in finance. How do stories fit into a budget presentation? Well, you could use the 3-act structure. This means you structure your presentation into 3 parts: The set-up ➡️ The confrontation ➡️ The resolution The set-up is where you introduce the situation to the audience.

Continue reading →

A lot of posts about presentation skills – mine included – are about slides. They are about what your slides should include, what they shouldn’t include, how they are designed, and structuring them into a story. But slides are not presentations. Slides are the supporting media for a presenter. What matters is what the presenter says … and how they say it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in recent weeks.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

𝗧𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗮𝘆. 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.

Continue reading →

Unless: 😂 It’s a good joke 😂 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.

Continue reading →

Here are seven things to do when creating and delivering a finance presentation to make sure it’s a success. Chastity. Be confident but don’t 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. Don’t include material you don’t need to tell your story.

Continue reading →

Here are seven things to avoid when giving a finance presentation. Pride. It’s 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.

Continue reading →