Gary Bandy helps public sector finance professionals write clearer reports, papers, and posts by ghostwriting or improving what they’ve drafted.
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. As luck would have it, late in 2022 the World Bank published A Guide to Data Storytelling in the Public Sector. The opening chapter
When I began working as a trainee accountant there were very few computers in the office and they were not on individuals’ desks. They were on tables because to be used on a shared basis. Most people in the Accountancy team did not use them at all. They used calculators
Here’s an instant tip to make your document easier to read. Set the margins and font-size so that the length of each line is around 65 characters. That’s two and a half alphabets. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm A line length of about 65 characters is optimal for reading. Lines that
Here are three ways to write faster and make fewer mistakes. 1. Use keyboard shortcuts. Keeping your hands on your keyboard to do routine things like select, copy and paste text, open and close documents, apply formatting styles is much quicker than mousing to the File or Edit menus 2.
Let me explain why you should avoid pie charts — and donut charts — in most documents and presentations. Pie charts are easy to create and they’re colourful and you might want to include lots of them in the reports and slidedecks you write. But there are lots of problems with
A picture paints a thousand words. A table of data could save you (and your reader) hundreds of words. But your table is a wasted opportunity if the reader doesn’t get your message from it. Or worse, skips over it. Here’s a tip to make the tables in
How to format a chart TIP: Remove the clutter from your charts. If you want your reader to get your message you need to make your message clear. Don’t just copy and paste a chart from Excel into a Word document or presentation. You need to format it first.
If you want the receivers of your finance reports to read them then you need to grab their attention at the top of your document. If you fail to do that they’ll skim your report (at best) or just do something else. Here are three ways you could start
I think somewhere during the journey towards a professional accounting qualification we adopt accounting-speak. Some of the words we learn are very specific, technical terms and we have to use them. I’m thinking of words like depreciation and recognition. But there is tendency amongst accountants to overwrite and
When you’ve got a lot of data to include in a document it often makes sense to put it into a table. The default table style in Microsoft Word puts a fairly thick black border around every cell in the table. This is both ugly and a hindrance to
If you have a short message to send you can save yourself some time by putting the whole message into the subject line. This is also better for the receiver since they do not need to open the message unless/until they are going to reply to it. The trick
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