Accept that nobody taught you this
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Accept that nobody taught you this
The principle
You qualified by proving you understood the numbers. Years of studying financial reporting, tax, audit, ethics and hard examinations. At no point were you taught to write, and at no point were you seriously tested on whether a reader could easily understand what you had written.
So the weakness in your writing not a flaw, but it is a gap where the training should have been. You were never shown how to do this, and you have probably never been told you were doing it badly.
Most of us learned the only way left to us: by copying. In my first job after qualifying I inherited files of reports and letters from the people who had held the job before me, and I wrote mine to match theirs. That is not learning to write. It is adopting other people’s habits, both the bad and the good, and passing them on to whoever inherits your files.
Why it fails in practice
The profession selects for one skill and is largely indifferent to the other. Accountancy attracts people who are comfortable with numbers, filters entrants by numerical ability, and trains them in technical content. Writing sits outside almost all of it. it’s not in the entry requirements, barely in the syllabus, barely on the mark scheme.
The result is a profession full of people who are, on average, far stronger with numbers than with words, and who have never been given a reason to notice the difference. When I was tested at work in the 1990s I came out in the top 10% for numeracy, which is no surprise for an accountant, and in the top 10% for literacy, which is not. I am an unusual accountant in terms of my interest in words and writing.
And because everyone around you trained the same way, you are measured against people who were also never taught to write effectively. A weak report does not stand out in a stack of weak reports. This is why the silence in ‘Do not mistake silence for approval’ is so complete: the reader learned to write exactly as you did, and is no better placed than you to recognise what is wrong and how it should be improved.
An example
I write case study exam papers for a professional accountancy body but I don’t mark them. The paper awards 4 per cent of the marks for presentation which is an acknowledgement that answers are set out matters. But 4 per cent is about as far as it can safely go. Raise the marks for communication to 20 per cent and a candidate could pass because their answers are clear and well presented whilst being relatively thin on the technical judgement competency that the qualification exists to certify.
The examiners who mark the scripts tell me the same thing regardless: many of the answers that pass are badly written. They are marked on the content of the answers: whether the candidate reached a sound judgement and supported it with the right evidence. Someone can qualify at the top of the profession having written an answer that no one would choose to read.
What to do instead
Don’t regard writing as a talent people are born with or without. It is a skill you were never taught. Nobody is born knowing double-entry; you learned it, deliberately, because someone set out to teach you. Writing is no different, except that no one ever set out to teach you.
The rest of this guide is the teaching you missed.