Gary Bandy helps public sector finance professionals write clearer reports, papers, and posts by ghostwriting or improving what they’ve drafted.
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.
Yesterday the company that supplies our energy sent me an email to tell me the amount of my monthly direct debit will change. Both the old and the new monthly amounts are shown to the penny. This suggests a level of accuracy in their estimation models than is justified by
Tables in reports are helpful for presenting information but you need to help your reader to see your message. Formatting your table can help but too much formatting works against you. All you’re doing is adding clutter. In particular, don’t use “zebra striping” (where alternative rows are shaded
This poster hangs above my desk. It is a reminder to be willing to delete bad writing. I hope my ratio of good writing to bad is better than 1:91 but bad writing is bad writing. The lessons for us all are: * Always read what you write. * Delete everything
We begin to write by using short sentences. As we grow so do our sentences. By the time we reach working age we think we need long, complex sentences to be professional. This leads us to a use jargon and unclear language. We end up writing without clarity and impact.
I was recently interviewed for the Human, Too podcast. In the interview I talk about my career path, which began conventionally with jobs in accounting and audit in local government settings but, after 3 years as a finance director, it changed. The second half is more interesting. And later in
Write shorter reports instead. Long reports usually have an executive summary that is maybe only 1 or 2 per cent as long as the report. Isn't this an admission that 98% of the report is not needed by most readers, if not all of them? One thing you
Remove the negative tone of your writing by using and instead of but to join two thoughts. When you do this you’ll sound more positive. We all know when someone says, “Yes, but …,” they are disagreeing with us. When we get feedback from someone that follows the “(comment 1)
Continuing my occasional series of typographic typing tips (I like that alliteration). Usually we use the full stop as the decimal point in a number but strictly speaking the decimal point should be at middle height of the digits not at the base. You want 123·45 and not 123.
A: when it’s a non-breaking space. Q: What’s a non-breaking space? A: A non-breaking space is used when you want the text on both sides of the space to stay on the same line of text. Q: Why should I care? A: Mostly you don&
For everything you write you need to understand how your reader will read it. Some things are read closely, word by word. Students can expect this for their essays. You can’t expect this for anything you write that has more than two paragraphs. Others are skimmed, with readers only
Excel changed the world by allowing users to format and beautify data, although this is often at the cost of clarity. This trend is worse with Microsoft Word, where users are bombarded with formatting options. That massive ribbon at the top of the screen is a siren calling to the