I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
Here’s a second clip from my appearance the Human Too podcast where I explain that being an introvert does not stop me from standing in front of a hundred people and talking. As well as being on the human Too podcast I will be delivering a presentation skills webinar with Hannah on 26 September 2024. You can find more details and register here.
I am the guest this week on Hannah Macdonald’s Human Too podcast. It’s a podcast that shows accountants are human, too. In this episode I discuss my career as a CIPFA accountant and how it divides into two halves. The first half is fairly conventional, rising through the ranks of local government to reach chief finance officer level. The second half is unique. I’ve been self-employed for almost 20 years and have migrated over that time from interim management and consultancy assignments to teaching and writing.
Write shorter reports instead. Long reports usually have an executive summary that is maybe only 1 or 2 per cent as long as the report. Isn’t this an admission that 98% of the report is not needed by most readers, if not all of them? One thing you can be confident about is that your most important readers – the decision-makers – will read only the summary. Shouldn’t we all write shorter reports instead of long reports with summaries?
Remove the negative tone of your writing by using and instead of but to join two thoughts. When you do this you’ll sound more positive. We all know when someone says, “Yes, but …,” they are disagreeing with us. When we get feedback from someone that follows the “(comment 1) but (comment 2)” we know the but is the warning sign. Sometimes two clauses need to be joined by ‘but’. Most of the time, however, you’ll find that using ‘and’ works just as well.
This is the final tip for writing more effective emails. Yesterday, I mentioned keeping your emails as brief as possible. The same applies to your replies. This is particularly important when responding to long emails and/or emails that ask for multiple things. Most people reply by hitting ‘reply’ and typing their comments at the top of the email thread (top-posting). This works for simple requests, but for longer emails, try responding inline.
This is the fourth of my five tips for more effective emails. Have you ever received an email asking for a document, someone’s phone number, some suggested dates for a meeting, and your thoughts on a current issue? Emails like that are hard to respond to. You likely don’t have all the information to hand, so you end up replying multiple times. The message thread quickly becomes confusing. Don’t inflict this on others.
This is the second of my 5 tips for more effective email messages. I learned the term BLUF (bottom line up front) a few weeks ago from a post by Trent Lythgoe. The term may be new to me, but the concept is not. In an email, get to the point as soon as possible. It may seem polite to provide context before making a request, but people are busy—don’t give them more to do than you need to.
Each day this week I am going to write a tip to help you write more effective emails. There are two challenges with an email. First, you need the receiver to read it and second you need them to take the action you want them to take. My first tip is about the first challenge. Use the subject line to help the receiver decide what to do. All of us have developed the skill of parsing the list of messages in our inbox to decide which ones to open.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a tip for improving your writing based on Excel good practice. This is another one. When you open Excel, you’re greeted with a grid where each cell has a faint border. This helps when creating a spreadsheet or financial model. But when you print your spreadsheet or export it to PDF, those borders vanish. Ever wondered why? You probably haven’t, but if all those borders were included in your print or PDF, your document would look terrible—messy and hard to read.
Have you ever struggled to read the serial number on a device because it is written in grey text on a slightly lighter grey background? I wonder at the product designers who create these accessibility challenges. Surely they know better? When it comes to your own presentations and documents you need to think about the contrast between text and its background. There are various online services for checking the contrast between two colours.