Turn your expert analysis into exceptional reports [webinar recording]

Gary Woodward
So let’s get started with the met with the main event. What I’d like to do today to share with you some of my insights from working, not just with clients and decision makers, but people like you who have to write for them.

In thirty minutes, I want to go through three main areas to condense a few of the tips and techniques that we explore in detail on our full day courses. In particular, I’m gonna focus on engaging your readers and encouraging to act, presenting your information with maximum visual impact, and how to write, efficiently, some techniques for writing efficiently.

So let’s start on the first bit, engaging our readers.

And the first step towards achieving that is to get into the habit of doing something so simple that it’s often overlooked, and that is about thinking about your readers properly and getting into the discipline of that. And you may think, yes, yes, I do I do think about my readers, but do you always do it properly and consistently? Now, we’ve got some slides on this, some questions on the slide here that really are the minimum you should think about before you start writing.

And the questions really help increase the interest level in your readers and the impact.

Only last week, I was talking to a senior manager who was complaining about having to spend a lot of her precious time wading through a technical report to work out what the implications of the data were. This is not untypical of the experience of many of the people we speak to.

So the discipline of answering these question these questions helps you avoid inflicting this this experience on your readers. They help you tap into your readers needs and avoid the indiscriminate download of information.

And this is this is a particularly easy trap to fall into if you’ve carried out a lot of research and to and are keen to show off all your hard work. Now, pay particular attention to that second question, what are the issues that concern them, not you? And I put that word them in bold to emphasize that. In other words, what’s on their mind about the topic?

That’s very often very different from what’s on your mind.

So really thinking about which bits of your topic are most important or relevant to them will help you frame your message powerfully.

And the main thing, especially if you’ve done a lot of research or analysis and you’ve got a lot of information in your mind, the main thing is to avoid avoid what we call the date the dreaded data download, which is just a download of all what’s everything in your mind without being selective enough based on your reader’s needs.

So this is this is the fundamental, the first part of just making sure what we write is really hitting the spot and hitting the target. Now what’s been interesting, some of the questions you’ve been sending us before, some of your your challenges, a lot of you have been asking about, well, how can we how can we keep things concise and interesting when we’re writing for a varied audience?

Now before we get onto something specific about that, there are two basic points we need to consider for that.

And and before we get onto those, it’s just worth reflecting on that some of our readers or some of your readers might prefer more detail than others. Some might have more knowledge about a topic than others. So what does this mean for us as writers? And those two points on the slide there, answer that question really to a certain extent. To use simple language throughout and to summarize the key points at the start.

Now that first point using simple language through throughout, We’re going to explore this in a bit more detail later, but for now, let me say this. Over the years, I’ve worked with lawyers, chairmen, chief executives, nuclear engineers, accountants, all sorts of different professionals, and I’ve never found anyone yet who’s complained that a document was just too easy to get through. No. They very rarely plead with you to make something more complicated because like you, they don’t have time to waste. They’re very busy people. So this is the first point whether we’re writing to someone with a lot of knowledge or someone with less knowledge we still want to make the language clear but accurate of course, that’s the key thing. The second key point when we’re writing for a varied audience is about summarizing the key points at the start.

Everyone will appreciate a summary whatever their background, and this doesn’t mean we abandon the detail, it just means we don’t force everyone through pages of background before we get to the points that matter.

We’re going to look more at summarizing shortly, but for now it’s worth remembering that readers, clients, customers, your boss generally prefer answers before explanations.

Now we might be able to go one step further when we’re when when your readers, needs vary. And and if we just reflect on that for a minute, if you think about your own experience as a reader, you’re reading a document and you get to a section that’s not relevant to you, what do you do?

Now at best you’d skip over it and at worst you may put the document down and not return to it. So there’s a risk there And as writers, we want to reduce that risk, when we’re writing for multiple readers.

Now how can we do that? Let’s look at a bit more detail behind that. Now one simple way is to try to categorize the information we want to include before we start writing, whether we’re writing a report or whatever it is we’re writing.

And we can put the the information into two groups, a information and b information.

Now a information is information that you think is relevant or important for all readers, for everybody. Everyone needs to know this.

And b information is the is stuff that’s relevant to some readers only.

Now once you’ve grouped the information like that, what we normally do is put the a information in the main text, these are the words we actually write, and then the b information, stuff that’s relevant to some readers only, you can use one of the options listed down on the slide to deal with b information.

An attachment or an appendix is a very common one, we might use a box out as well in in a report. This helps, engage different readers and it tends to make the thing more concise.

So these are just some options to think about when you’ve got this mixed audience in terms from a structural and a structuring point of view.

And doing this makes makes your document more concise and you’re less likely to lose readers too, which is obviously a critical thing when we’re trying to influence in writing.

Now, as I’ve mentioned already, summarising is vital whether you’re writing for one reader or several different readers.

So let’s look at this skill in a bit more detail.

Before they embark on reading a long document, most busy readers are usually asking themselves some variation of the following questions.

And answering these questions in your mind will give you the basic outline of a good summary.

Now the first question is this, why am I reading this? Now when people are so time poor and their time is precious, they want to know the answer to this question before they spend a lot of their time reading it. So the very first thing in a summary, a good summary, is just to answer that question, just very brief purpose and contact context. Just a few sentences sometimes because this is a summary. It’s not the whole document. So the first question to answer is why am I reading this? This is the first question in the mind of the reader that you as the writer need to answer, and you answer it with a brief purpose and context.

The second question on their mind is what do I need to know more than anything else? In other words, what are the most important issues contained in the longer documents? So to answer this question, we need to include what we ask key messages.

Now this could include your finding, a summary of your findings, conclusions, risks, options or recommendations in summarized form.

It’s whatever you consider to be the headlines or the story of the longer document.

So this is the second question often in the reader’s mind, we can answer this question by stating our our key messages or the key points.

The third question in their mind is what do you want from us, if anything?

Now it’s critical you let your readers know if you need a decision or approval.

Now because all good business writing is about action, so be clear whether you want them to approve a course of action or give you a decision.

So so this is these answering these three questions will really give you an the the basis or the skeleton of a good summary at the start of a document. And because our readers are having to process so much more information than ever before, summarizing well is increasingly important, and I think will continue to be so over the next few years.

Now, two very common questions about summaries.

One that comes through quite a lot and I think a couple of you have mentioned this already in your challenges, which is how long should they be? Well, there’s no magic answer to this, and it does vary really depending on the length of the longer document.

But usually, it’s between half a page and two pages with one page being the most common.

The second question is if I do a really good summary, does it mean that the readers won’t read all the detail I spent a long time preparing?

Well, there may be some truth in that, but in fact, I was asked this question only recently, and it’s an understandable concern, but in my experience, the opposite tends to be truer. The better the summary, the more likely they are to read your detail, the detail in the rest of the document. So anything you can do to make the summary engaging is a good thing.

A graphic maybe, a few bullet points, not too many, more on that later, some subheadings, shorter paragraphs.

I often with summaries I often see just one or two pages of text and it’s not that inviting it doesn’t really entice the reader in so, this is what we need to consider with summaries And make sure you can stand alone. Does it tell a story by itself?

We do not want the summary just to describe the structure of the document. We need real content.

And we talked about the length there already. Yeah.

Good. So these are some fundamental ways of getting your reader engaged and drawing them in so that they really really try to get to grips with your the analysis you’ve spent so much time on.

And now we’ve got some some good fundamentals in place, let let’s look at something a little bit more advanced now.

Now you you may have faced this situation many times.

You’ve done some research and you have to present findings to a client or a boss, but what’s the best way of doing it? Now you may be very good at this, which is great, but the kind of the the information we see or the way the information is presented on the slide here is very typical of what we see a lot of. In other words, people do lots of research and then they present their their findings in just a list of data points like this.

Now if you’re anything like me, I find that quite difficult to to work out what what the person is trying to say with the data here. It’s making the reader work very hard. It’s simply a list of findings. We’re scratching our heads having to work out what the implications are if any of this.

Now what can we do to try to go from data to something that’s a bit more valuable or a bit more meaningful?

Well, one question to consider to help us with that is this so what question. It’s a really important question to ask yourself when you’re presenting lots of data and information because in your mind, you understand or you might understand the implications of the data, but you really have to join the dots for the reader, you have to spell it out for them. In other words, with your reader in mind, ask yourself what does the information mean to them and their business? What do they or even you need to do as a result of it? This will get your thinking in the right direction.

This is the fundamental in terms of the thinking. Now what can we do as well with that data just to make it more engaging and digestible for our reader? Now I’m gonna give you a second version of that cycling data now. Now we’ll just go back a second.

Here’s the list. You don’t have to understand this. You don’t have to work it all out. I’m I’m gonna show you how to how to improve it, but just so you can get a flavor of the the information.

Okay. And now I’m gonna go to one stage of improvement.

So here’s another version of the same data. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s getting clearer and a bit easier to understand, and your reader is more likely take to take action because of that.

So what we’ve done is, let me summarize what we’ve done and I’m gonna show you a slide on with all the steps to go through in a minute, but basically what we’ve done is we’ve put the data into groups.

Now sometimes it’s easy to do this, sometimes it’s not in this particular case the data did lend itself into some of the grouping in some in some situations you can’t see an obvious grouping so at the very least there what I would recommend is, just finding a way of dividing simply into two categories or two groups, like most important or least important. Just some way of dividing it to make it easier for the reader to process.

So the first step, put the data into groups if possible.

Then we’ve given each group a heading.

Now notice these headings, they are not simply labels or descriptions.

We have not just said women in cycling and cycling to work or cycling to school, no, we’ve gone a bit further, we’ve tried to use the headings to summarize the main message or conclusion of each section so what do all these data points mean? They mean that not enough women are cycling to work What do these data points mean? So each heading of each group is a little conclusion or summary in itself, and this is very reader friendly too.

And you’ll notice as well as well as doing that, we’ve we’ve actually added the put the headings in bold. This gives a bit of visual impact and typographical contrast. This is very important too.

And finally, we’ve put the main message first. In other words, we’ve answered the so what question at the very start. So the conclusion of all of this, in theory, might be we need to do more to promote cycling. Now we put that at the beginning, not at the end. It’s important to start with our conclusions where possible and not end with them. Because as I said earlier, generally speaking, there are exceptions.

Generally speaking, readers, prefer answers before explanations.

And this is an example of this. So I think you can see it’s a lot more engaging, but we might be able to do even more than this, and we especially from a visual impact point of view. Now let me just go on to the next slide.

Now I’m a big fan of of someone called John Moon who who who’s developed a concept called words in tables, and this concept is an alternative to the normal way we might write a report or even slide decks, And you can find out lots more about this on his website. It gives you lots more examples. We’re just gonna look at a couple today.

And this is the same information taken a stage further and add by adding a couple of extra things that John Moon talks about in words in tables.

So the two extra things are, we’ve put the the text in columns and we’ve put things in a table. So the finished article would look something like this.

And I think you’ll agree it’s even more scannable now. It’s even easier to process the information.

We can see straight away what that text on the right is saying because of the headline, the summary on the left at each point.

And and the fact that the text is in columns on the right makes it really a lot easier to process. By the way, this is why newspapers have columns because it it keeps people reading.

So this is a this is another way we might consider presenting some of our information for today’s time poor and busy readers.

It’s a great alternative to big blocks of text in a traditional report and adds great visual impact, I think, and it’s easier to scan. It’s also a brilliant alternative to bullet points, especially in slide decks.

Now let’s just look at a couple of other quick examples.

Now this would be my maybe if you’re using PowerPoint as a handout, you could use the same concept. Those of you if you’re consultants, you might, or or whoever, if you use, like, slide decks as a as almost like, a Word document, a working document. You can see here, here’s another example of that. In that kind of scenario, we’ve got the points on the left, summarizing the text on the right. This is just a more detailed version of a work what we call words in in tables.

And I think you can see it’s quite easy to to navigate and quite easy to process.

Okay.

So we’re gonna take a couple of questions in a minute. Before we do that, let’s just summarize what we did with that cycling data.

We categorize the data into two or more groups.

We summarize the content of each group with a heading, and then we put the points within each group in a logical order or hierarchy.

And I didn’t mention that before, but when we’ve got groups of information, it’s quite important to to try to come up with some sort of sequence or order of points.

And if possible, add a conclusion or headline to the start of your analysis.

And for further visual impact, put the information into columns within a table to add, as I said, to add further visual impact. Okay.

So we’ve gone through quite a lot already, quite a quick pace, I hope this is okay for you but let’s just pause I think, to take a couple of questions. Let’s just see, if we’ve got any questions here. I think we have. If you can just bear with me a second.

Okay. So we’ve got a question here is, how do you have how do you entice a reader to keep reading? Well, one of the ways as we talked about is is by thinking about our readers properly, what’s most interesting to them, and that’s a really big part of that. The other part is how we lay a document out using plenty of good subheadings, shorter paragraphs, and and all those kind of visual things, some of which we’ve looked at, you might consider word in table. And the third aspect of how they you keep a reader reading is some of the language we use, how we put language together, which we’re gonna look at in the final section of the webinar very shortly.

Okay.

And a similar question here from Sheena. How do you keep documents well structured, but simple and interesting too? Well, it’s a similar kind of answer, Sheena, but we also, on our blog, you can see lots of others you can find out lots of other structuring techniques, to help you with structure and to keep it reader friendly. I’d recommend you look at some of those. In particular, we look we we use mind mapping and spidergrams for structuring documents.

Okay. We might have time to take a couple more questions at the end, but we we should keep moving for now.

Okay. Just a few just a just a few points on bullet just a few quick points to do with bullet points, if you know what I mean. I’m not gonna read this through, but bullet points are not always bad. They can be really good if used carefully and selectively.

But just consider those points there on the slide, when you’re using bullet points. In particular, points two and three.

We want to avoid long lists of them, and they need to be an order really for them, for them to be reader friendly.

Okay.

Okay. We’ve done the questions. Quick words on tables and graphs. What I would say is, tables are good for detailed numerical information, graphs tend to work better for patterns, trends, insights, these sorts of things.

It’s not exact, but generally speaking, yeah, this is, this is the main difference.

And just as just as a quick illustration on tables, I just wanted to, see how what we might do to a table. A lot of you might be presenting analysis or numerical data in a table.

I just wanted to show you a few quick things you could do to a table to improve it. Very quickly. So here’s here’s an example table, it’s and I think you’ll agree, it’s pretty low impact. Now if you’re a football fan, you might be familiar with the content, but the way it’s presented is putting a massive burden on us as readers.

It’s really difficult to process.

Now, if we look at some of these points here, if we follow some of these points it will really make a difference to our tables and I I just wanna spend a second on that first point in particular, it says put the rows and columns in a logical but reader centered sequence.

So what does that mean? Now if we go back to our original table, this the the order of the columns is presented in a very logical way, a sequential way, but actually the most important column there from the reader’s point of view is not the number of games played really, but the number of points.

So it actually makes sense, I think, to move that column, the number of points, closer to the team names as the first column because that’s the most important thing for most readers there.

So again, as just as with documents, we want to put the main message first or the main message early. The main message here is that column about points.

Okay?

So that’s the most obvious thing. And then we can also do some visual things to improve the table.

Okay. Let’s see what it looks like.

You can see, it’s quite a big difference. We’ve added a title and, like, a headline at the the the start as well. Notice we’ve moved the column, the number of points closer to the to the team names, and we’ve added a bit of space there as a gap to a little visual bit of visual separation between the most important information and the rest of the information.

We’ve put the the the rows a bit closer together. This helps scanning value. And we’ve put the the overall heading of the table in bold for a bit of, bit of impact too.

So this is just something very quick on tables, just to if you’re using tables, just bear some of those points in mind. I’ll just go back a slide.

We want to avoid as well too many grid lines in tables, especially vertical ones.

Okay.

Right.

Now we need to do the last few minutes on making impact with language and, as with all of the other points today, it’s it’s a a critical skill. And before we look at the specific techniques, just a key thought to hold on to, we want clear writing follows clear thinking. So we want to write in a way that’s simple, natural, clear, and we can keep our technical words and phrases, but we have to be careful about some of the other language around those technical words and phrases. So don’t be tempted to impress with vocabulary or intricate language. Now, in our courses, we go through eight powerful techniques to bring bring your writing to life so that your readers can grasp your messages easily.

In our final bit of time together, I just wanted to give you a glimpse of three of those techniques.

The first technique will make your sentences more engaging, it does so because it removes the mystery from them. Take a look at the next sentence on screen.

Owing to the state of China’s economy, fears over Brexit, a gloomy trade forecast, and increased regulation, we recommend option one.

Now you can see in that sentence, you’ve got the main message of the sentence or the news, and you’ve got some supporting information.

The main message here is, the main message of this sentence is the bit in bold, we recommend option one.

But you can see that the news is right at the end of the sentence. This is not very reader friendly, and it really slows down comprehension.

So what we’d recommend is to try to put the main message first in your sentences where it makes sense to. And another way of saying that is can you put the what before the why. And if we just have a look at an improved version here, we recommend option one because of the state of China’s economy, fears over Brexit, etcetera, etcetera. You don’t have to use bullet points, especially given what I said earlier, but that’s one way of of of restructuring it to make it more reader focused.

Okay. The next two techniques will give you give energy and conciseness to your writing too. Let’s look at the first one.

Now this technique is what we call you keep your doing words doing, and what I see on the left hand side here, I see an awful lot of this in business writing. They these for these words here are nouns. The bits with the bits of bold in them are are once upon a time, they were verbs, but they’ve been turned into nouns.

And these are like waffle magnets because for them to make sense, they need all these other supporting words around them. Now if we look at the verb equivalent here on the right hand side, look how much clearer it is by using verbs more than nouns, they’re much more efficient and, so we want to when we were we were in our own writing we want to look out for lots of words ending in I o n or m e n t, this is a little clue about, okay, maybe I need to use some some verbs here and sharpen your style a bit. Now very quickly, let’s look at this in action, you can see those words ending in I o n or m e n t, these are nouns where you might be able to use verbs, and you I think you probably have to see quite quickly how to how to transform it.

Now there’s a five word difference here, just in one sentence, imagine that same pattern repeated a hundred, a thousand times over a long document, what a difference it could make in terms of the reading experience.

Okay, so first first technique, put the main clause first, second technique, use verbs more than nouns, third technique, to finish on, is what we call favor the active voice.

Now, this also is this will give real confidence to the writing and energy too, and if we have a look at this sentence here, this sentence in your on your screen is what’s called in the passive voice, and this is because the subject of the the the action, the doer, is becoming is coming after the action, or after the thing happening.

Now to make it active what we do we take the doer or the subject and put them immediately before the action or the verb, and this is now we have an active structure.

And generally speaking readers find this kind of writing easier to process and easier to visualize.

And you might obviously it says there, we’ve gone from eleven words to nine words, so it’s starting to become more concise.

But now we’ve done that, we might see a way of becoming even more concise.

So you might have spotted it already, but in theory, we might be able to go to this third stage.

The prime minister will decide next week.

And so again, we’ve gone from eleven words to seven words. Imagine that multiplied along, you know, many many times, that same pattern over a longer piece of writing.

Now just using one of what using just one of those techniques can make a real impact but all three together will give give things a real boost and, and really make things an easy read which is what you want for your readers.

Now that almost, brings us to our time together, you know those three techniques, those style techniques, before we take a few closing questions, let’s use the words in tables concept we introduced earlier to recap on what we’ve been through today.

I’m not gonna read through it. I’m just gonna leave it on your screen for just a minute or so for you to to read it and take it in.

Okay.

Just one question now. And you can have these slides, don’t worry. We’re gonna send you the slides. I know we’ve been going through at a good pace today.

You can have the slides No, no problem now just I think we’ve got time for maybe one question let’s have a look here one’s from for Cecile Hi guy. What about using visuals pictures, images? Yes. Good I good idea so long as there’s a point behind them.

So just try to avoid putting visuals in just for the sake of it. Yes. It’s good to add some interest, but we want the visual or the graphic we don’t want the reader having a so what question in their mind about the image or about the graphic. So it needs to have a point to it, in other words.

Okay. Let’s have a look. And one question here, it says about how do you make things about, how can you make your writing more concise? Well, I think those those techniques we looked at using the active voice, using verbs more than nouns, and, and, putting the main clause first. Those three, will be a big help. We go through more on our full day course, and you can also look on our blog. You might find one or two more on there as well.

But, that’s it for now. Thanks again for joining us, and I hope to see some of you soon.