Writing a report? Follow these steps to put it together in an organized and structured manner.
- Know what it’s about. Believe it or not, a lot of people start on reports without a clear idea of what their subject is about. Get this part right before doing anything else.
- Define what your audience needs from the report. What will your audience want to get out of the report. Put it down and use it as a guide to decide the direction of your work.
- Scope and size it. Define the scope of the material and set definite boundaries. This will help you work in a more focused manner. At the same time, try to estimate how long it’s going to be. That way, you can prepare your schedule for the amount of work you’ll need to accomplish.
- Outline. Create a basic skeleton for your report. This will be useful as reference for next stages.
- Gather information. Align your current information to your outline. Fill in the missing parts by doing more research.
- Decide on style. Make your style decisions before you start writing, so you can let it define how you’ll do your draft. The last thing you want is to have to write an entire first draft because you wrote informally when you actually needed a formal business tone.
- Provide an executive summary at the start and a conclusion at the end.
- Make good use of visual tools.
- Edit and proofread. Don’t ever submit anything that qualifies as a first draft. At the least, review it and use a writing check software.
- Fact-check. Always double-check your information, especially on a medium that relies as heavily on it as a report does.
