Most accountants suck at presentations
Here are 5 tips to make your next presentation better.
I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
Here are 5 tips to make your next presentation better.
I am old enough to have worked in an office where reports, letters and memos were handwritten and sent to a typing pool to be typed. Typists were trained to leave two spaces after a full stop (period). This was because typewriters use monospaced fonts — they have to because the reel has to move the same distance after each letter is typed. Two spaces after the full stop helped with the readability of the document.
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? The way to fix this is to show the invisible characters in your document. You do this by clicking the button that has a backwards P on it (the symbol is called a pilcrow). Having switched it on you will see blue dots for each space character, and symbols showing the tabbed-spaces, line returns, paragraph breaks, page and section breaks and table cells.
There are authors who write their books by hand. With a pen or pencil. Until the industrial age this was the only way Writing by hand can help with creativity and maybe there are times when you would benefit from this. Many, many years ago I wrote a novel. The first draft was written by hand. Typing it into my computer was the first stage of editing: not every word or sentence made it into the computer file.
“I apologise for such a long letter - I didn’t have time to write a short one.” — Mark Twain. Accountants (and lots of other professionals, I’m sure) write convoluted documents because they don’t have (make) the time to write clear ones. If you want YOUR reader to get YOUR message then YOU have to make the effort. They have lots of other things they could be doing instead of reading your report or email so you’ve got to make it easy for them.
Your reader has limited time. Do them a favour with your emails and reports and keep them as short as possible. If a document is short (it fits onto 1 page or 1 screen) the reader can read it and remember what you want them to remember. If you include everything in your email or document (all the context and your reasons for writing it, etc.) there’s a risk they will remember NOTHING.
Here’s some advice for your first presentation to a large audience. I understand that many accountants are more at their keyboard than talking a crowd. Many of us are introverts. I fall into the 99th percentile of introversion so that almost certainly means I am more introverted than you. But I’m not shy. I discovered that I rather enjoy making presentations. Here are three tips to help you make a success of any presentation.
Pie charts are easy to create and they’re colourful and you might want to include lots of them in your documents and presentations. 👇 Let me explain why you should avoid pie charts — and donut charts — in most situations. garybandy.micro.blog/uploads/2…
Does your organisation have a style guide? This is a document that sets out standards for written communication. It could cover preferred spellings, rules for capitalising words, lists of words and phrases that should be avoided, etc If your organisation has one you should, of course, use it. If your organisation doesn’t have a style guide I suggest you find one online that you like and follow it so that at least your documents will have some consistency.
To deliver a successful accounting presentation, you need to write good content, design effective supporting visuals and rehearse. You also have to be aware of your body language. What you do with your body, hands, face will affect the tone and impact of your presentation, and whether your audience trusts you and understands the information you’re presenting. Here are some tips to keep in mind when it comes to body language in accounting presentations: