Welcome — and thanks for reading. This blog is for finance professionals who want to write with more clarity, purpose, and impact. I cover topics like: * Presenting complicated and technical ideas in plain language * Common writing mistakes and easy ways to fix them * Tips to improve your productivity when writing * Getting
In the public sector, written reports need to be clear and credible because the audience is usually non-experts. Yes, AI can generate reports fast. But it doesn’t understand your stakeholders, your risks, or your political context. And let’s be clear: AI isn’t actually intelligent. It doesn'
PowerPoint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real talk, and audiences to pretend that they are listening. (Edward Tufte, 2006) Ouch! Take a moment to reflect on your own presentations. Have you ever been in front of an audience (in the room or on the screen) and
Most presentations would be better without slides. Because most slides compete against the presenter instead of supporting them. I know what it's like. A presentation is looming and you leave it late to create slides. And when you do finally open PowerPoint you do the obvious thing: you
All those borders are clutter. They get in the way of the message. The vertical lines obviously get in the way of a reader scanning across the rows. If you have your data in columns that are aligned (left for text, right for numbers) then let the white space between columns do the work …
Modelling behaviour is a core part of leadership. If you’re a finance leader, your presentations should inspire good practice in your team ... but too often they inspire mediocrity. When it’s your turn to present, do you: * Ask someone to put together a bullet-point slide deck? * Glance at the
We don’t send original letters back with our replies—so why do we include the full text of every email in our responses? Email systems automatically create message threads. There’s no need to repeat every line of a previous message. Instead: 1. Highlight the sentence or two you’
A: Constraints lead to innovation. The scientists working for DeepSeek didn't have the money and data centres filled with £30,000 microchips so they had to find a different way to build artificial intelligence models. They did it by asking better questions of the data rather than cramming
Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious. So said Saint Thomas Aquinas. Let me paraphrase it: not every long document is worth the time it takes to write it and read it. Remember that when it comes to writing your next long-ish document. Think about whether you are
Have you ever received an email asking for a document, someone’s phone number, some suggested dates for a meeting, and your thoughts on a current issue? Emails like that are hard to respond to. You likely don’t have all the information to hand, so you end up replying
The episode title is TL;DR and I talk about ways that internal auditors can improve their communication in terms of writing and presenting. It was a fun 25-minute conversation with host Jon Taber and includes lots of tips that can be implemented immediately. You can listen to the episode
PDFs are OK to read on a laptop but they are terrible to read on a phone. And busy people do a lot of reading on their phones. So ... we should stop sharing PDFs and share HTML documents that are responsive to the dimensions of the device they are on.