I've started to doubt a rule I was taught about abbreviations. The rule is to write the term in full the first time it appears, put the abbreviation in brackets, then use the abbreviation from there on. Take IFRS. Every accountant knows the initials. Few would write out
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