On 19 November 1863 the main speaker at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg talked for two hours. He was Edward Everett, former senator, former president of Harvard and the most celebrated orator in America. He delivered some 13,000 words from memory. Can anyone quote a single
I once spent a full day fixing the formatting on a 100-page policy document. Multiple authors had worked on it, each with their own understanding of how Word works. Some knew about Styles and used them properly. Others made text look like a heading by bumping up the font
The cost of unclear writing is real and it is large, but it never appears on an invoice and nobody is asked to account for it. The writer pays first, in the hours spent drafting and redrafting a document that does not land. The reader pays next, in the time
I keep a note of sentences that are harder to read than they need to be. Most come from documents that are otherwise careful and correct: it is the writing that lets them down, not the thinking. Here is one I added last week, a definition of fraud. Fraud is
Busy readers skim headings and reads little else. Think of the committee member turning to your report the night before the committee meets, the chief executive rushing through a briefing note between meetings, or the finance director trying to catch up with a backlog of unread emails. They run an
Look at a typical business report. The effort is obvious. The charts are in the brand colours. The KPIs sit in little speedometer gauges. The risks are a grid of red, amber and green. There is a table so dense the total has to be picked out in bold. It
Open almost any board report pack and you will find one. A table that fills a whole page: thirty budget lines, three years of comparatives, variances in pounds and again in per cent, all set in eight-point type so it fits. Somewhere in that table is the one number
A hyperlink is a decluttering tool. It lets you move supporting material out of the sentence and behind a word or phrase, so the text stays clean and the reader who wants the detail can still reach it. This works for a quick email as much as a full report.
The monthly accounts land in a manager's inbox. The figures are right. The statements are complete. The accountant who prepared them has done the work and moved on, on the quiet assumption that the numbers speak for themselves. The manager will see what they show. They will not.
Every accountancy qualification tests technical knowledge: bookkeeping, IFRS, audit standards, tax, treasury. None of them test whether you can write a paper that changes a decision, or explain a number to someone who's already made up their mind. By the time someone reaches CFO, or chief auditor, or
Most accountants don’t think they have a writing problem. There’s a good reason for that, and it’s not complacency. The professional training system never showed them they did. To pass accountancy exams, you need technical accuracy. Marks go to correct calculations, sound judgements, appropriate recommendations. A few
In a 2024 survey, Deloitte asked 200 CFOs what quality they valued most when choosing their successor. 39% said communication skills — the ability to explain results clearly and simply. It was the top answer. Not technical knowledge. Not financial acumen. Not strategic thinking. Communication. Every board paper you write is
Tax Policy Associates has mapped 81 of the UK's 90 taxes onto a single interactive chart, ranked by revenue raised in 2024/25. The other 8 yield nothing at all, so they don't appear. The various taxes on employment account for almost half of all tax
Most public finance reports are written for the writer, not the reader. The structure follows convention. The headings mirror last year's version. The executive summary is four pages long. The recommendations are at the end. Nobody planned it that way. It just happened because the incentive was to
Most accountants and auditors don't trust their readers. And it shows in their writing. They repeat themselves, use jargon when plain words would do, and explain things twice, just in case. This backfires. When readers get a dense, jargon-heavy document, one of two things happens: • They struggle
I signed a contract today for the 4th edition of Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector. It will be published by Routledge in early 2028. The 4th edition will include new material on: * Gender budgeting * Sustainability reporting * The use of AI in public finance. These aren't
Office workers spend 31% of their time in MS Office on formatting. That's more than a day a week spent on fonts and margins instead of thinking. The real problem is not the formatting itself. It's that people open Word or PowerPoint before the content is
It's unread because of three fixable mistakes. Most unread documents aren't ignored because the content is bad. They're ignored because of structure and presentation failures that are entirely fixable. 1. Put your bottom line first. You know the numbers inside out. So you present
Cluttered slides don't just bore your audience. They undermine the audience's trust in your financial judgement. I've sat through hundreds of finance presentations. The worst ones all make the same mistake: cramming too much onto each slide. Budget variance tables with 15 columns. Bullet
The problem with most financial documents is that they're written backwards. The writer starts at the beginning of their analysis and drags the reader through every step until they finally reach the conclusion. It's exhausting and it wastes time. The way you solve a problem is
Jargon isn't the same as precision. Finance professionals defend technical language as if the two are identical. They're not. Some technical terms are genuinely necessary. Accrual, materiality, going concern. These have specific meanings. Using them with a finance audience is legitimate. But most finance jargon isn&
It's probably the skill that will define your career more than any technical knowledge. I'm talking about clear writing. I qualified as a CIPFA accountant in 1990. I passed exams on accounting, audit, reporting, ethics. I learned how to prepare accounts and analyse budgets. But nobody
Finance people know their reports are rubbish. Too long, too technical, too boring. Hard to read. Then they go back to their desks and write exactly the same way. I've been in finance for over 30 years. I've written two textbooks and taught at business schools.
Your tables are invisible. Not literally. But readers skip them. They see a block of numbers, a generic label at the top, and their eyes glaze over. They move on. You spent time building that table. You chose the data carefully. But without a clear message, it's just