Online Class: Report Writing 101

Getting Started on Writing Reports

There are three things you need to know up-front before you begin to write any report. Think of these three things as the seasoning that will help give all your reports the flavor that they need. These three things are:

1. The company image you need to convey
2. Your image that you need to convey
3. The message you need to get across

The company's image, as well as your image, will help determine the tone you need to take when writing the report. You'll be able to use the same tone for most reports you write, which means that once you understand what needs to go into the tone of your reports, writing them will become easier.

Ask yourself these three questions to help establish the tone:

• Why are you writing the report?

• Who are you writing the report for, and what do you need them to understand?

• What tone should you use?

With the majority of business reports, your tone should always be:

• Confident, but not arrogant. For example, don't write, "You must agree that I am the expert on this subject." Instead, write, "My experience with X, Y, and X have provided the insight I needed to conclude that…"

• Courteous and sincere, not condescending or accusatory. Don't write, "You didn't do this, so that happened." Instead, write "There was an error with this, so that happened."

In addition, you should:

• Write at the required level of difficulty. For example, if your position within your company requires extensive knowledge of technical terms, but the audience that will read the report will not be familiar with those terms, try instead to use terms they will be familiar with and won't cause confusion when they read the report.

• Make sure to use non-discriminatory language. This means using gender-neutral job titles (salesperson instead of salesman). Avoid demeaning terms, masculine pronouns, and implying gender if it's not necessary.

• Stress benefits. For example, avoid saying, "I will look into this matter tomorrow." Instead write, "I will have an answer for you on Friday."

• Use subordination. "The Human Resources Department has finished reviewing employee time sheets and has concluded that tardiness will no longer be tolerated and will result in disciplinary action." Use subordination in the middle of the report where you are presenting information.

• Use emphasis. In other words, let your words be firm. "Tardiness will no longer be tolerated," instead of, "We ask all employees to avoid being tardy from this date forward." Emphasis should be used in the beginning paragraph of the report, then at the end of the report.

The most important part of writing a report is getting your message across to your audience. The message contained in the report is what makes the report useful, interesting, and effective for the people that read it. It doesn't matter if you include all necessary information in the report. If that information isn't organized, written properly, and fails to deliver the right message to your audience, your report is useless.

Let's take, for an example, a report about why your department went over budget. You can write a report that includes all the purchases and expenses that sent your department over budget. This is the correct information, so you've included the correct information in the report. If you were writing the report for your boss, who is also in your department, this may suffice, because the message you want to give him is what caused you to go over budget. However, if this is going to another department, such as Accounts Payable, that information alone will not deliver the proper message. Perhaps the message Accounts Payable needs to receive in the report is why you went over budget on purchases or expenses.

That said, to deliver the right message, you must first define your audience.

Once you've gathered the information that will make up the basis for the report, ask yourself the following questions:

• Will your audience want a detailed explanation or brief facts? Using our example, will your audience need to know the purchases or expenses in detail – or the facts about why you needed to go over budget?

• Will your audience need to know how you arrived at the facts?

• What does your audience already know?

• What's the purpose of your report? Does it need to educate your audience? Does it need to persuade your audience? If you're explaining why you went over budget, you may want to educate your audience as to why. On the other hand, if you are requesting permission to go over budget (before you do), you may need to persuade your audience that going over budget is necessary, or in the company's best interest.

• If additional people may read the report (if you'll send copies or the report will be shared) is there any other information you need to add? You'll still want to focus on your main audience, but you might want to add extra information for them. Just don't get sidetracked from addressing your message to your main audience.

Next, once you've defined your audience, you need to decide exactly what it is that you want to tell your audience – or the message you need to deliver. The best way to figure out the message you need to deliver is to decide what information will be most important to your audience. It's quite possible that you will have a lot of information you could share with them in your report, but what you need to figure out is what information your audience needs to have.

What information do you have that directly relates to your audience?

If you're having a hard time figuring that out, you can take a step back and ask yourself what the audience will do with the information in the report – or even why they need the report. To do that, complete the sentences below:

"My audience needs the information in my report to ________."

Or…

"My audience needs the information in the report because ___________."

You may complete the sentence like this:

"My audience needs the information in the report because they need to understand why my department went over budget, and why going over budget was necessary."

Your main audience can be one person or a group of people. No matter who your main audience is, once you've figured out what information that audience will need in the report, you can start to put your main message together.  

The main message will guide you as you write the report. Once you've figured out the main message, you'll find that all the information just falls into place as you write. Needless to say, it makes things a lot easier.

To figure out your main message, ask yourself this question:

What is it that I want to tell my audience the most?

In other words, out of all the information you need to provide to your audience, what's the single piece of information that either is the lead-in for all other information you need to provide – or is the one piece of information that will ignite interest from your audience.

Using our example again, if the accountant was our main audience, perhaps the information that you would most like to share is that your department went over budget due to increased expenses, but that sales nearly doubled in your department during the same period. If the accounting department creates budgets, the accountant would most like to know that, although you went over budget, you more than compensated by increasing sales.