Writing about writing about finance

/

I’m going to pivot. I’ve been a public finance accountant for 30 years and up to now I’ve written posts relating to public financial management. Actually, what I am really interested in is writing. So from now on…

I am going to post tips, stories and resources about writing with an emphasis on how they can be used by accountants and finance professionals to improve their work outputs.

One assumes that all accountants are numerate but how many of them have ever received training in writing? And yet, accountants are nothing without words. Their role is to summarise and analyse financial transactions in ways that generate meaningful information that they then have to communicate to an audience, whether that be internally to managers or externally to investors, auditors and the general public.

I think there is scope for many accountants to improve their written output: not just long-form reports but also emails, letters and slide decks. Some of the improvement is literally about the words they use and the order they assemble them but they can also improve the way they set out data in tables and charts and the layout of all that on the page or screen.

Follow me on LinkedIn.

Let me help you write more effectively

/
Let me help you write more effectively

When I was a finance director I came to realise that I did not write very much. True, I would review reports and other documents created by the accountants and others who worked for me, but I rarely created a document.

That grew to become more and more frustrating. Frustrating because it limited by ability to be creative and also because, often, the documents I was reviewing were not as well-written as they could be. I was caught in the place where I knew I could write the documents better but I did not have the time to do it.

Read More

Shorter lists are more persuasive

/
Shorter lists are more persuasive

I am sure you often find yourself needing to write a list within a document. It could be a list of findings from an audit, lists of the pros and cons of a proposed course of action, or something similar.

For these kinds of lists it makes sense to start with the most important item (important in the context of the document) and then have the others in descending order of importance. The problem with this is the ones at the bottom of the list may well be relatively trivial and their very inclusion undermines the rest of the list. The last item a reader reads has an impact on how they feel about the list as a whole.

Read More