I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
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.
Continuing my occasional series of typographic typing tips (I like that alliteration). Usually we use the full stop as the decimal point in a number but strictly speaking the decimal point should be at middle height of the digits not at the base. You want 123·45 and not 123.45 What you need to type is called an interpunct or dot space. The way to do this on a Windows computer is a bit awkward.
A: when it’s a non-breaking space. Q: What’s a non-breaking space? A: A non-breaking space is used when you want the text on both sides of the space to stay on the same line of text. Q: Why should I care? A: Mostly you don’t need to care. The app you are writing in will take care of line breaks and wrap your text as you type. It is a problem though if, for example, you leave a space between a currency abbreviation and the number, or write large numbers with a space rather than a comma.
TL;DR Break long formulas into shorter steps. Break long sentences into short ones.
Learn a few basic concepts of graphic design so that what you write is more readable. This if the last of my five tips for writing about finance. First, the optimum length of a line of type for readers is 65 to 75 characters. That is why newspapers and magazines are set out in columns. Standard A4 paper with 2cm margins and a point size of 10 or 12 will have far too many characters per line.
This is the fourth of my five tips for writing about finance. Voice transcription is built into computers and phones now so why not use it to turn your thoughts into writing. The big advantage of this is speed. I’m sure you can speak faster than you can type. The technology has got much better at grammar these days that you don’t have to specify punctuation marks; it figures out what’s needed, where.
This is the third of my five tips for writing about financial subjects The aim of tables and charts is to convey a message to the reader. For that you want the message to be clear. This means: clear away gridlines be careful about the use of colour so that it enhances rather than obscures the message give the table or chart a meaningful headline instead of a factual title order the data in the way that makes the message clear (such as making the most important item the top row of the table) consider rounding figures to 2 significant figures.