If accountants want their messages to land with every part of their audience, they must know how to tell a compelling story as efficiently as possible, says chartered accountant and business-writing coach Emma Scott-Smith.

“My goal is to help ‘numbers people’ communicate to ‘non-numbers people’ with impact,” she explains. “That’s something accountants can often lose sight of. Part of that comes from the effectiveness of their training: they can glance at a spreadsheet and very quickly grasp what that data reveals about the condition of a business. That done, they assume others can see the same. But those who aren’t as confident in interpreting data might say, ‘What’s the practical meaning of this column or percentage?’”

Scott-Smith points out that board members have their own specialisms within a business, often not financial in nature, while shareholders hail from all sorts of backgrounds. Only auditors and regulators are likely to match accountants’ skillsets. So, storytelling must overcome those differences. Accountants need to provide material where the core points shine through clearly for everyone, requiring no frantic digging on the reader’s part.

Thinking innovatively about formats can help. “A typical annual report aimed at shareholders opens with a section on corporate strategy, then one on governance, and then we get reams of financial statements and notes, so it’s all about creating the greatest impact within that accepted template," Scott-Smith says. "But with board-focused communications, such as internal audit reports or one-off pieces of research, there are opportunities to be much freer with the format and look at the best way to tell the story.”

Reports are often too detailed

For Scott-Smith, the vast majority of copywriting sins that make reports difficult to read stem from excessive detail.

“In one firm I worked with, the company secretary blurted out, ‘Hold on, we’re sending out a pack for our four-hour monthly board meeting that’s 600 pages long? That’s ridiculous – complete overwhelm,’” she recalls. 

Scott-Smith had a word with the managers who wrote the submissions that went into these packs, advising them to cut their submissions down to six to 10 pages focused on key points that are easy for board members to digest. “The trouble was, there were lots of very intelligent actuaries who were excited to tell the board about their intricate modelling. But I urged them to stop and consider their readers: did they really need to know all that?”

To further illustrate this approach, Scott-Smith mentions a presentation course she ran. 

“I drew a huge rectangle on a flipchart and said, ‘That’s everything there is to know about your topic.’ Then inside that, I drew a box a quarter of the size: ‘That’s all you know about it.’ Then, inside that, a tiny box: ‘This is all you can cover in 10 minutes.’” 

“The colour would drain from the trainees’ faces,” she recalls. “But the exercise focused their minds on how to prioritise and minimise information.”

In that spirit, here are Scott-Smith’s tips for how to make your storytelling pop off the page.

1. Use a pyramid structure

Namely, the Barbara Minto Pyramid. This model encourages storytellers to state their case in a set pattern: open at the top of the pyramid with your primary takeaways, then head down into the supporting arguments. Only after that should you get into the weeds of your underlying data. 

“Don’t be afraid to hit people with your recommendations straight away,” Scott-Smith says. “Detail-oriented people always like to work from the bottom up, putting the granular data first. But that could lose readers instantly. Lead with your ‘why’ or ‘what’ – the main reason you want your audience to tune in. People want insight not information.”

2. Be creative with your layout 

“Someone at ICAEW who I spoke to recently observed that space had to be optimised when producing printed reports as paper was expensive, but now that reports are all PDFs, it doesn’t matter how many pages you use,” Scott-Smith says. “There’s a valuable point here: whitespace is your friend. In a PDF format, you can use that asset to break up your text and make it easier on the eye. There’s no need for reports to look or feel intimidating.”

3. Harness the power of pictures 

Similarly to whitespace, using photos and graphics moves the visual style of your reports away from big blocks of text and helps you to punctuate your points. Graphics can also bring your material to life and improve ease of understanding. 

Scott-Smith notes, “There’s a book called Knowledge is Beautiful by David McCandless, which is essentially pages and pages of infographics on various aspects of how the world works. It’s a great springboard for thinking about how to get across key points in pictures rather than prose. Never underestimate the power of a pie chart, graph or table to draw readers in. Different people engage with reports in different ways.”

4. One idea per sentence; one topic per paragraph 

Applying this rule will ensure that your sentences don’t flit confusingly from one idea to the next, or run on for too long before you finally reach a full stop. It will also help you guard against the text looking overcrowded and blocky. 

“We’ve all been in a bookshop where we’ve seen a cover and said, ‘Oh, that looks interesting,’ then we open the book, see it’s full of really dense paragraphs and quickly put it back on the shelf,” Scott-Smith says. “If your paragraphs are in danger of turning out like that, put in a paragraph break whenever you come to a new topic – or even when you take a new angle on the same topic.”

5. Surround long words or phrases with simpler ones 

“If we think about a finance term like ‘accumulated depreciation,’ that’s two five-syllable words stuck together,” Scott-Smith notes. “Every time you write that in a report, it increases what I call the ‘fog factor.’ So, help those sorts of words or phrases go down more smoothly by putting simpler words around them.”