I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
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:
1. Use keyboard shortcuts There are shortcuts for most of the popular actions such as copy (Cmd/Ctrl + C), paste (Cmd/Ctrl + V), save (Cmd/Ctrl + S), and open (Cmd/Ctrl + O). In Word the shift key combined with arrow keys highlights text faster than you can drag a mouse. Don’t try to learn every shortcut in one go. Learn one or two and when they become second nature learn another couple.
Finally got around to creating a Gumroad shop for the various digital products I create.
If you want your reader to get your message you need to make your message clear. Don’t just copy and paste a chart from Excel into a Word document or presentation. You need to format it first. Here’s how.