I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
Using charts in your documents could save you and your reader hundreds of words.
But your chart is a wasted opportunity if the reader doesn’t get your message from it. Or worse, skips past without even looking at it.
Your presentation will be more memorable is you use more images and less text in your slides. But whether the images are photographs or charts or diagrams, they need to be high quality. Don’t use clip art, or low resolution stock photos with watermarks on them. I guess most of the time you have zero budget to acquire media to use in your presentations, so here is my list of resources that are FREE.
Here’s an instant tip to make your document easier to read. Set the margins and font-size so that the length of each line is around 65 characters.
That’s two and a half alphabets.
After you’ve written a document in Word do you find the text does not look right? Are there unexpected line breaks or extra-wide spaces between some words?
You need to check your invisibles!
ChatGPT is “like a brainstorming partner who is tireless but not very smart.”
Here are three ways to write faster and make fewer mistakes.
Let me explain why you should avoid pie charts — and donut charts — in most documents and presentations. Pie charts are easy to create and they’re colourful and you might want to include lots of them in the reports and slidedecks you write. But there are lots of problems with them: they are difficult to interpret when there are lots of slices in the pie especially if some of the slices are very thin adding data labels makes them more cluttered and using a table for the data would be clearer putting pie charts side by side does not show trends.
I’ve read lots of posts where people explain how they are most productive before they eat breakfast, or late at night, or after they’ve been to the gym. I’m none of those things. I’ve never had a good answer to the question “What time of day are you most productive.” I write about finance almost every day. Sometimes I am writing a big project, such as the manuscript for Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector.
Don’t overwhelm with details: While it’s important to provide context, avoid overwhelming your clients with too much information. Stick to the most important points and keep the presentation concise. Don’t make assumptions: Avoid making assumptions about your clients’ financial literacy. Ask questions to ensure that they understand the information you’re presenting. Don’t ignore questions: Be prepared to answer questions from your clients. Ignoring questions or providing vague answers can damage your credibility and trust.
A picture paints a thousand words. A table of data could save you (and your reader) hundreds of words. But your table is a wasted opportunity if the reader doesn’t get your message from it. Or worse, skips over it. Here’s a tip to make the tables in your documents have more impact: Instead of giving a table a title that simply describes its content, write a headline for it that summarises what the table means.