Report writing skills training course

Contents

Dedication

The aim of this book

Praise for Report Writing

About the Author: Dr Margaret Greenhall

Executive Summary for Report Writing Skills Training Course

Work flow for writing a report

Chapter 1: What makes an excellent report?

Components of an excellent report

Objectives for reports

Agreeing the objective

Chapter 2: Planning and Resources for your Report

Brain Writing

Method 1: File card frenzy

Method 2: Sun diagram and mindmap

What resources do you need?

Chapter 3: Organizing your Report

Information reports

Research reports

Proposal reports

Chapter 4: Presentation of the Report

Making your report memorable

Layout style

Layout checklist

Looking after your files

Procrastination

Writing good English

Chapter 5: The Finishing Touches

Editing the report

Writing the executive summary or abstract

Proofreading

Printing and finishing

Distribution

Celebration

Checklist for the stages of writing the report

Action Plan

Final Thoughts

Further resources and reading

About the publishers

Copyright and Title

Report writing skills training course.

How to write a report and executive summary, and plan, design, and

present your report. An easy format for writing business reports.

Copyright © 2013 by Margaret Greenhall.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced either electronically

or on paper without permission in writing from the publisher, except for

passages of less than 500 words for purposes of review.

ebook ISBN 978-1-84937-080-6

Dedication

I would like to say thank you to all five of my parents, my first ones who have

been with me throughout Christine and Ken Vaughan, my extra one whilst

growing up Margaret Jones and my two that I was lucky enough to share when I

got married, Irene and Gordon Greenhall. They have all helped me in so many

ways and I have grown in their love and support.

I’d like to say a massive thank you to Martin, my husband, who has supported

me through so many ventures and put up with my odd working habits. I love you

very much.

Finally a thank you to Sally, my unofficial mentor, without whom this particular

book wouldn’t have been written as she was willing to let me work with her staff

to help train them in report writing skills.

Thank you all, Love Margaret

The aim of this book

Is to teach people, with various levels of experience, how to plan, write and

present information as reports. The book includes a range of opportunities to

practice and develop their skills.

Praise for Report Writing

“Very useful, it has given me a great number of useful tips and information.”

“This will help me to organize and structure my work in a logical way.”

“I will now have a structure to use when preparing future reports and I will feel

much more confident in doing this.”

“I now understand how important preparation is when writing a report.”

“The list of eight questions is fantastic, I will always use this for my reports from

now on.”

“Very informative and useful.”

“These techniques can be applied in my work straight away.”

“Extremely interesting and useful – vital preparation if you need to write reports

for work.”

“Very easy to take back into the work environment.”

About the Author: Dr Margaret Greenhall

Margaret was a chemistry lecturer for eight years and it was during this time that

she was asked to teach the foundation study skills to the new students. This

started her interest in how people learn and how the learning environment can

help them learn better. She also was involved in educating adults through the

access to science course and a special project for the millennium where she

helped people discover an interest in science by wading in a river and catching

plastic ducks. She moved to staff development and again learned more about

how people share information with each other.

She then moved to an administrative role at the University of Manchester and

was suddenly confronted with tasks that she’d never done before. One of these

was to write reports that went to the highest level of the university, the vice

chancellors. This was scary, people assumed that coming from a highly

professional background that she would know what to do. This got her

investigating how to write reports and she realized that this connected with many

of the skills she’d worked on with her students about taking in and sharing

information.

In 2003 Margaret left the university to start a training business, specializing in

helping people to understand and share information easily and efficiently. This

includes topics such as speed reading, improve your memory, creative problem

solving and report writing. This book on report writing combines and shares the

unique style of creative planning and sharing information.

Margaret can be contacted at www.inspirachange.co.uk, margaret@uolearn.com

Executive Summary for Report Writing Skills Training Course

The aim of this book

Is to teach people, with various levels of experience, how to plan, write and

present information as reports. The book includes a range of opportunities to

practice and develop their skills.

Excellent reports

An excellent report is a concise and accurate record of information that contains

only the data relevant to the readership and record keeping process. It will be

neatly laid out and easy to read with a simple structure that allows easy access to

the information.

Setting objectives

Before you start to write your report you need to work through a series of 8

questions and write a clear objective for the report. This should then be checked

by the person who initiated the report.

Planning reports

Before you start to write the report you need to create a plan for the sections.

The suggested technique is to separate this out into steps, so that you can think

about what the information is and then organize it. You then need to gather all

your source material together and advice is given on how to read a large amount

of material.

Types of reports

There are three main types of report

1. Information

2. Research

3. Proposal

Each has different possible sections that could be included. All benefit from a

title page, aim, executive summary and bibliography. In addition the components

in the following table may be added. Some thought needs to be given as to

whether all sections are necessary and what their order should be.

Section headings should be meaningful to your audience, not just single words.

Executive summaries

A summary of the report can be included at the start, this should be no more than

5% of the report length. It should be in the same order as the report and should

only include material that is in the main report.

Organizing the report

To make things easy for people to remember, have white space, give no more

than 4 ideas at once and people tend to remember start, ends and anything

unusual.

Layout style

The recommended font style is sans serif (straight) and 12 point. People are

advised to use the style formatting capabilities of their software as it makes both

consistency of style and generation of contents pages easier.

There are also additional materials on grammar and diagrams on

www.uolearn.com

Editing reports

Editing is about checking that the content matches the original objective and

making the report as concise and easy to read as possible.

Proofreading

Proofreading is about looking for errors such as grammar and spelling mistakes.

It should not involve changes to the content.

Printing and distribution

Time needs to be left before the deadline to make sure that the printers can finish