Report writing guide: tips and examples

A report is an excellent document that will enable you to share your data and findings in a professional and well-detailed manner. However, writing it is not easy, and you need to know several things to grasp this knowledge. Writing a report varies from other forms of writing; hence why it is great to do your due diligence before starting.

You need to know several sections and must be included in the report to make great. There are numerous reports such as business reports, technical reports, law enhancement reports, narrative reports, and many more. Each report has its format. In this article, we will discuss ways of writing a useful report and examples.

What is report writing?

In the academics world, the term report usually confuses students with an essay. A report, however, is written for clear reasons to a specific audience. It involves the presentation of detailed information and evidence, analyzed and applied to a particular problem. The information presented is in an exact well-structured format that involves excellent use of sections and headings to make the information to enable a more comfortable location of the information and follow. Students can pay someone to get report.

Tips for writing a useful report

Know the objectives

You need to ask yourself the reasons behind writing the report. What drives you to write it? What is your goal? You need to know if the report you want to write is for academic purposes or business ones. The audience also plays a crucial role when composing a report. It can be internal or external that involves presenting to your professors and many more.

You must also know after which duration you will be revisiting the report, whether monthly, quarterly, or yearly?. Is it for those above you or those in your field? Knowing your objectives is a very crucial thing that will be contained in your document and will help you know the place you will go and gather the information.

Create an outline

All forms of writing require an outline first. This will immensely help you in structuring the report, knowing the resources you need to get all the results, materials, and other crucial things. The outline is just a dummy and should not be in-depth, but it is a starting point for the report.

You will be referring to this report for your full report writing exercise. You must first understand the report’s objectives and then list out the main points and few bullets below, which you must ensure that you have covered vividly in the report’s content.

Conduct the research

Begin to look around your topic and gather the research that is needed to put together the report. You will collect the research from online sources, journals, experiments, or analytics and numbers. Ensure that all the studies are added to the outline to enable you to know the numbers and information about each of your points. After the completion of collecting all the things, you can now start writing. You will be going back from time to time to look for more information and do a thorough research throughout, and that will be okay.

When you ensure that you have all the materials that you need to cover, you can go to the next steps and get started.

Writing a Good Cover Page for the report

You are now ready to start writing the report, but you need a useful cover page. Ensure that you have a template when you want to write a good cover page. It will help you immensely in spicing up the report’s design than just making it a black and white word document. It will also help you design the title page excellently and pleasantly to make it stand out to the audience.
When coming up with effective ways of determining how you will write the cover page, there are several things you need to put in mind. The most important one, however, is the title of the report. Other things are who the report will address, you, the one preparing the report, the date, or the company’s department.

If you have the information on the cover page, it will be a great way to enable the readers to know what is inside the report and the person it addresses.

Writing a report table of contents

The next thing you need to write is the table of contents, you may not be knowing how the report will be laid out yet, but the outline will help you start here. During the process of writing the report or after finishing writing it, you will be coming back and updating the table of contents to match the headings and the subheadings.

Since you must ensure that it will be easy to navigate, ensure that the page titles and the subheadings relate to what you place in the table of contents.

There are several ways you can design a great table of contents; they include:

• Aligning the table of contents so that the titles are directly next to the page numbers,
• Have dotted lines or other visual flow elements that guide the reader’s eyes across the table straight to the page numbers.

Writing the introduction of the report

You need to write a summary or the introduction first when writing a report. It should go across just one of the two pages to give the reader a brief glimpse of the findings’ results. You need to know about the methodology used to gather the material you will cover within the report, whether research, an experiment, gathering analytics, looking via the CRM data, calculating the revenue, or more.

You may also want to add visuals to make sure that you tell the story. It can be anything from the pictures, icons, or graphics. You can also include the shapes to assist with the designs.

Writing the body of the report

The body will basically comprise all the discussions of the report. After putting it together, the outline conducted the research, created the cover page, table of contents, and introduction; the next thing you need is the body. It means that you must know what the report’s main parts will have, thus helping you go deeper into the body.

Although the reports vary immensely in length, the length will depend on the topic. Shorter reports usually have one single topic, and longer ones having multiple ones.

Split the body into sections

You must discuss each header that is in the table of content. The headers, i.e., introduction, body, and conclusion, have subheadings that you will also dive into. The body must be divided into several segments that will be based on the things that they cover. When coming up with the Annual Report, you will divide it into sections.

Breaking the body into subheadings is a very beneficial and crucial thing. It enables the readers to read the report and understand every section quickly.

Go into the results and findings

This is where you will get into the research you have collected and discussed the topic. During the subheadings you have discussed, ensure that you back them up with the results you have found.

Reports are formal, hence you need to keep this in mind when writing. Try as much as you can to avoid a conversational tone, use contradictions, and ensure the sources are correctly cited. Ensure that all the aspects of the report’s topic have been covered, including the relevant statistics, up to date research, and many more.

Use data visualization and graphic organizers

The whole report should not just contain the texts. Include images, icons, graphics, charts, and graphic organizers is an incredible way of visualizing the content and make the point understood clearly.

When making a business report, data visualization is great for showcasing your numbers and statistics in an easily digestible manner. Knowing how to tell a story using data is an incredible way of creating a good report. You, however, need not stop on the data visualization within the report.

Adding photos and graphics into the report design is an excellent way to represent the text and engage the readers well. A report will be very dull if it only contains texts.

Cover the materials used

Ensure you add the materials that were used to find the results of each of the sources. The section will be sometimes sweet and short. Ensure that all the sources are correctly indicated.

Summarize the section

Not every section in the report body will be long enough to need a summary, but if you have a section with a lot of information or goes through numerous pages, you need to summarize at the end.

How to write a report conclusion?

Writing a conclusion shows that you are finalizing the report. Begin by summarising the points. You may have written small summaries for each section, but you will now need to give an overview of the Whole Report. Refer to the findings and discuss what they mean. Use the conclusion to talk about the context of the body in the real world.

You will also need to talk about the next steps. Write down the goals and strategies for using the findings. Ensure that you are not introducing any new information.

Add the sources

You have covered the materials and all the resources that have been used in the body. Still, you need to have a section of the bibliography at the end, which lists the sources in an alphabetical order to enable the reader to access more information.

You can add the acknowledgments by thanking particular organizations who helped you put together the report content. You can add a glossary at the end. Still, it depends on the glossary at the end to assist you in defining the terms of the industry for the external readers that are having difficulties in understanding. Also you need to know, that essay correctors can’t help you to write a great report.

Report writing formats

• The report must have the following sections:
• Title page
• Acknowledgments
• Terms of reference
• Summary/ abstract
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Methodology
• Main body
• Results
• Conclusion
• Recommendations
• Appendices
• References
• Bibliography
• Glossary

Report writing example – a business report

A Report on Staff Turnover in CBC Generation

Submitted Dec 9th

Conclusion

Writing a report may seem like an easy task but it is not. There are numerous reports that exists and each has its own format. In this article we have discussed the general formats of the articles and how to effectively write them.