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The longer version is sometimes easier to read
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
Write headings that carry the message
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
Pretty beats easy to read
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
Data your reader will understand
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