{{< summary >}} _I Feel Fine_ by the Beatles is a fantastic pop song but it does not have an ending, it just fades out. I guess Lennon and McCartney did not have time to work out a proper ending (unlike with _Help!_) and the song feels unfinished. You don’
George Orwell wrote an essay (_[Politics and the English Language](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/)_) in 1946 where he explained his six rules for clear writing. I’m sure he did not have accountants I’m sure he did not have accountants and auditors in mind when
{{< summary >}} The most important thing about giving a finance presentation is having something interesting to say. If you don’t have some insight about your data then you might as well send the data in an email. {{< /summary >}}<!--more--> If you do have something
{{< summary >}} As a newly-qualified accountant I took a time management course. It still helps me today. {{< /summary >}} <!--more--> One part of it was how to deal with incoming post. I learned there were four things you could do with an incoming item of post.
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
It's one reason I quit being a finance director at the age of 40. I worked in public finance jobs for 19 years and writing was my favourite part of the work. In my 20s I had jobs in accounting, internal and external auditing and I wrote quite
 Reading your text, whether as prose or bullet points, is bad enough. You can make things worse if you turn your back on the audience at the same time. Always remember, you are the presentation, not the slide deck. The slides
 Recently I read an article by Adam Bryant, a former editor at the _New York Times_, entitled [Leaders Need To Be Good Writers, Too](https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Leaders-need-to-be-good-writers-too). In the article he explained that an effective manager requires strong
The following will help your writing be clearer and plainer. They are taken from the [UK Government’s style guide](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-style) (I know, who would’ve expected that?). ❌ leverage — go with influence or use instead, unless you mean leverage in its financial sense. ❌ progress
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
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
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