Helping finance professionals to have more impact by improving their writing and presentation skills
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.
How do you tell a story in a finance presentation?
You’ve read lots of posts that talk about data storytelling but what does that mean? And how can you tell a story in a presentation when you’re an accountant with a load of finance data?
Bad writing costs your organisation a lot of money, too. A few years ago Josh Bernoff did some research into the “Sad State of Business Writing”. He surveyed business people who write at work and got over 500 responses. Amongst his conclusions were these gems: Bad writing was costing the American economy about $400 billion a year (that’s 2 per cent of GDP) 81% of respondents said that poorly written material wasted a lot of their time Only 38% agreed that their writing teachers at school/college prepared them well for business writing.
I’ve long had the view that accounting is about words as well as numbers. That’s why I keep writing about the need for accountants to be better at writing and presenting.