Gary Bandy helps public sector finance professionals write clearer reports, papers, and posts by ghostwriting or improving what they’ve drafted.
The way people read has changed and so should the way we write. When newspapers first went online, journalists wrote articles in the same way they always had. This meant articles were often split across several webpages with a button at the bottom of each page to go to the
For some people hell is other people. For me, it’s other people’s PowerPoint slides. We’ve all sat through bad presentations. * Too many words. * Tiny charts. * The presenter reading every word out loud. * Or looking at the screen, not at us. They're boring. They're
Want to write finance content that actually gets read? Start with the 3Ls of financial writing: language, layout and look. * Language – Use plain English to explain your ideas and messages without dumbing them down. * Layout – Structure your content so the message is clear at a glance. * Look – Make your document
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 …
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’
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
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