IntroductionBusiness reports differ very widely in size and scope. An "occasional report" to pass on information to a colleague or update him or her on a situation may be scarcely distinguishable from a long memo, and a report for colleagues on a meeting or seminar that you have attended may only run to a few pages. On the other hand, a formal report in which you investigate an issue on behalf of a large group or an organization and produce conclusions and recommendations may be as long as a thesis or even a small book. There are certain features that are common to the writing of all reports, however, so let us begin by considering those.The basics of report writing, in fact, do not differ greatly from those of other types of writing. You should know the purpose for which you are writing and keep it clearly in mind. You should know the readers for whom you are writing and keep them clearly in mind as well. You should give considerable thought to the scope of the report, which will depend in part on its purpose and its intended readership. The terms of reference and the length may be determined for you—you should always get as much information as you can from whoever is commissioning the report before you begin—or you may set your own terms of reference. In the latter case especially, you may, as Suzanne D. Sparks says in The Manager's Guide to Business Writing, have to "balance the two parts of the information equation—what [you] want to give and what [your] readers want to receive" (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999, p. 137). A compromise, she suggests, may be required in which either you provide less information than you have available in order to keep readers focused on the main issues and not take up too much of their time, or you extend your research because you know that your readers will want more factual detail than you have catered for at the outset (p. 138).The essential purpose of a report is to report. This has certain consequences for the style in which a report should be written. You would normally be expected to embark on any kind of investigative report with an open mind. If you or whoever commissioned the report had already decided what decision or course of action you wanted to take, then the writing of the report would be an essentially pointless or insincere exercise. This does not mean that in the course of examining the situation and preparing the report you may not reach conclusions as to the advantages and disadvantages of particular choices or actions, because it is part of your task to do so, and it is quite legitimate for you to write persuasively for or against something in the relevant section of the report. But you should start out with an open mind and an intention to assess alternatives fairly and objectively. This intention should inform your writing, which should be plain and factual and avoid emotive language.The Structure of a ReportThe following is intended as a basic outline for a formal report. Obviously, not all reports will require all these sections.Title Executive summary List of contents List of tables and figures Introduction—setting out the terms of reference and the background to the report Presentation of factual material Analysis of factual material Conclusions Recommendations Appendices References It may suit your purpose better to combine the presentation and analysis of factual material together in a single section. Similarly, your conclusions may lead on so immediately to your recommendations that these both are best dealt with in a single section. On the other hand, to place something in a separate section gives it extra prominence. It might give extra force to your recommendations if you put them in a bulleted list. (On the use of appendices, see under managing length, pages 266–267.)Let us look briefly at certain features that are special to reports.The Executive SummaryThe executive summary is similar to the abstract of a thesis in that it condenses all the material in the report, including the conclusions and recommendations, into the space of a page or two. Its purpose is to enable a busy executive to assess whether he or she needs to read the whole report, only certain sections of it, or none of it. For general advice on the writing of summaries, see the companion volume to this one, The Facts On File Guide to Good Writing, chapter 1.)The List of ContentsThe executive who elects to read only certain sections of the report will need to refer to the table of contents. The list of contents should show not only the titles of the various sections, with the page numbers on which they occur, but also the various headings used within each section, likewise with page numbers:| 3 | Evaluation of the Intranet systems currently available | 27 | | 3.1 | The Wondernet system | 27 | | 3.2 | The Intraspace system | 30 |
HeadingsEven a short report will benefit from the use of headings. Headings mark off separate sections and enable the reader to navigate more easily through the page. They also break up the page and improve its appearance.Both main sections and subsections should have headings in a formal report. You should use different fonts for different levels of heading. For instance, you might use CAPITAL LETTERS or Boldface for the headings of main sections and italic or underlined italic for subsections. It is usual to number headings in a report according to the decimal system in which the first figure stands for the number of main section and the second for the number of the subsection, as in the contents list example above. Headings should be consistent as regards the type of font used and their numbering. It may be counterproductive to introduce too many different levels of heading into a report. Two or three levels of heading will suffice in most instances.
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