I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
It’s one reason I quit being a finance director at the age of 40. I worked in public finance jobs for 19 years and writing was my favourite part of the work. In my 20s I had jobs in accounting, internal and external auditing and I wrote quite a lot of reports. As I was prompted to more senior roles I would write less and less. Management jobs are more about reviewing and approving other people’s writing than writing anything yourself.
Reading your text, whether as prose or bullet points, is bad enough. You can make things worse if you turn your back on the audience at the same time. Always remember, you are the presentation, not the slide deck. The slides are there to support what you are saying. If someone can get your whole message by reading your slides then why should they bother listening to you? You could have just sent them an email.
Recently I read an article by Adam Bryant, a former editor at the New York Times, entitled Leaders Need To Be Good Writers, Too. In the article he explained that an effective manager requires strong written communication skills. Two of the biggest traps to avoid are: ❌ Treating writing as different from speaking. Don’t use words and sentences in your written communication that you would not use in speech. ❌ Writing as if your audience is as much of an expert in the subject as you are.
The following will help your writing be clearer and plainer. They are taken from the UK Government’s style guide (I know, who would’ve expected that?). ❌ leverage — go with influence or use instead, unless you mean leverage in its financial sense. ❌ progress — use work on or develop or make progress. ❌ dialogue — use speak to or discuss. ❌ utilise — write use instead ❌ agenda — use plan instead.
People don’t like to be asked. They especially don’t like it if you have more power in your relationship than they do. You’re putting them in a difficult position. How can they be critical of you? And yet, how do you know whether what you have written or presented is good or needs improvement if you don’t get opinions from other people? What you need to be able to improve is proper, constructive criticism.
Sartre said hell is other people. I suggest that hell is other people’s PowerPoint presentations. We have all sat through terrible presentations, whether in real life or in online meetings. We have all seen slides with too many bullet points, and charts we cannot read. We have heard presenters simply reading their bullets points to us, or improvising because they have not rehearsed. We have seen presenters cling tightly to the lectern or turn to face the screen rather than the audience.
There are lots of reasons why you might want a summary of a long piece of writing. You might want an executive summary for the front of a long report. Perhaps you want a summary you can use when you present your report at a meeting or to put into an email where the report is attached. Or maybe you need to summarise something someone else wrote. Until about 15 years ago MS Word had an Auto Summarize function.
Well, your intuition is probably right. Microsoft recently published its 2023 Work Trend Index report. It includes some analysis of how workers are using the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. It shows, on average, workers spend most of their time (57%) communicating and only 43% creating things. There’s a lot to unpack from that finding. Communicating covers meetings, email and online chat. Perhaps you could get more creative work done if you had fewer meetings to attend.
If you have a short message to send you can save yourself some time by putting the whole message into the subject line.
I know that’s not the stereotype of an accountant but hear me out. Many presenters fall into the trap of thinking that the only way their audience will understand anything is if they explain everything. I think this may be especially true in financial presentations. When you work in finance you know all the details and nuances and want to include them to make sure everything is 100% correct. End result: you say too much and the audience remembers none of it.