Try this if you struggle to focus when you’re writing
I write the first drafts of everything in a text-editor app rather than a word processor.
Here’s why.
Posts in: Blog
Here’s an easy way to upgrade your presentations without paying for a training course.
Do you create your presentations by writing a series of slides containing bullet points? Lots of people do. And yet, do you like to watch presentations where the presenter talks through lots of bullet points? Do you think your audience is different from you? There are lots of problems with bullet points in presentations. They: are distracting increase cognitive load look and feel robotic bore the hell out of everyone make you predictable Bullet points also look like they are your speaking notes, and probably should be your speaking notes and not on the screen.
Accountants overcomplicate everything
Richard Feynman said, “If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.” Feynman was talking about physics but I think the same sentiment applies to accounting and finance. Except, instead of a first year student you should be able to explain finance to a non-financial manager. If your audience is not made up of qualified accountants you need to use simpler language. With a non-financial manager you can’t hide behind terminology like amortisation and volume variance.
3 ways to make your writing clear and concise
You’ve read many times the advice to keep your writing clear and concise. But how do you do that? Here are three things you can do on your next piece of writing.
A tip for public sector finance professionals looking to learn something for the future
CIPFA includes communication and impact as one of the key competencies for public financial management professionals. That means developing skills in telling stories with financial data. The ability to take data — to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it — that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades. As luck would have it, late in 2022 the World Bank published A Guide to Data Storytelling in the Public Sector.
To get better at writing finance reports you need to read more
Writing is different from most skills. For most everything you want to get better at the advice would be to practise it. But, the recommendation from writers to wannabe writers is to read as much as possible. Well, I can listen to as many songs as I want, watch as many football matches as I like, and eat in as many restaurants as I can afford, but I won’t get any better at playing guitar, football or cooking.
Here are the best 3 tips to improve your emails
I’ve read ten articles on writing better emails at work. Here are the best 3 tips to improve your emails.
Most accountants suck at presentations
Here are 5 tips to make your next presentation better.
Pro tip: Only 1 space after a full stop
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.
Check your invisibles
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.