The Plain Finance Style Guide

Finance qualifications teach you to get the numbers right but they don't teach you to write well. So most finance professionals write the way they were shown — long reports, buried conclusions, tables nobody can read — and nobody ever tells them it isn't working, because everybody writes that way.

This guide is the correction. It sets out, one principle at a time, how to write financial documents that take you less time and get read the way you intended. It's free.

Start at the top and read it like a book, or jump to whatever you're stuck on.

1. Why your writing is worse than you think

  • Do not mistake silence for approval
  • Accept that nobody taught you this
  • Count the cost of not being read
  • Write to find out what you think

2. Before you write a word

  • Name your reader
  • Decide what you want them to do
  • Decide the answer before you start
  • Assume they have ten other papers to read tonight

3. The first page

  • Put the answer at the top
  • Write a headline that takes a position
  • Ask for a decision, not a note
  • Summarise the answer, not the contents
  • Earn every line of page one

4. Structure

  • Order by importance, not chronology
  • Cut the background section
  • Write headings that say something
  • Give each paragraph one idea
  • Send the detail to an appendix

5. Sentences and words

  • Say who did it
  • Tell the reader why the number matters
  • Delete the words that mean nothing
  • Rewrite any sentence you cannot say aloud
  • Write for someone who was not in the meeting
  • Use verbs, not nouns made from verbs

6. Numbers, tables and charts

  • Use a table when the reader needs to look something up
  • Cut the table to four columns
  • Round the numbers
  • Use a chart when the reader needs to see a pattern
  • Show one line and the threshold that matters
  • Delete any chart that needs a paragraph to explain it
  • Use colour once

7. Presentations are written, not designed

  • Write the talk before you open Keynote
  • Give your answer in the first thirty seconds
  • Make the words carry the message, not the slides
  • Let slides illustrate, not duplicate
  • Make one point per slide
  • Never read your slides aloud
  • Write the handout as a separate document

8. The document as an object

  • Treat typography as part of the argument
  • Do not fill the white space
  • Keep the defaults, and know the exceptions
  • Number things so they can be found again

9. Process

  • Read it aloud
  • Run the checklist before it goes out
  • Use AI without producing slop