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Writing reports

General duration

1 or 2 days

Target group

This program will highly focus on the preferred format and style of written documentation required by organisation. The facilitator will speak with your representatives to determine required formats, structures and any style guides established within the business The facilitator will also send a pre-course questionnaire to participants asking them to submit three pieces of writing they have recently prepared.

From this material, the facilitator:

assesses their writing ability
gains a thorough understanding of the written work they prepare, and
extracts examples for use as training material within the program.

This personalises the program and learning points become more relevant and specific to the participants. Participants use their own work as examples and training material.

Learning objectives

At the completion of this program, participants will be able to write short and long reports which are clear, concise, complete and correct, and in the format required by the organisation.

Course content

Communicating in business

The difference between academic writing, creative writing and business writing
The Government Style Guide as a source of technique
Internal style guides

The composing process

The 4 step process to writing
- Gather material for the specific purpose of the document
- Use a spidergram to order information
- Draft
- Edit

Techniques to increase comprehensibility:

Sentence length and structure
Main message first
Passive/active voice
Conversation style
Use minimum words
Modern formatting techniques and visual presentation
Positive phraseology

Reports

Short reports
Longer reports
Identifying the reader and purpose of the report

The different formats and structures of reports

Factual
Analytical
Proposals
Minutes of meetings

General qualities

Cover page
Executive summary
Table of contents
Standard heading structures
Writing clear conclusions and recommendations
Appendices
Inclusion of diagrams and tables
Referencing
Formatting
Layout
Version control

Writing one-page Board reports

Executive summary

Techniques to enhance credibility

Writing a cost benefit analysis
Force field analysis
Writing a convincing argument
- substantiating claims
- statistics
- specifics
- features/benefits
appropriate level of glamour

Take-aways