SOLUTION: Gerard’s report writing workshop | My Assignment Tutor

Week 1 Topic by Gerard Ilott – Friday, 12 March 2021, 4:40 PM Gerard’s report writing workshop Part I: The structure of the report Welcome Welcome to my little workshop on how to structure and write a report, especially the style of report I expect for Assessment Item 2. I decided to offer a small set of workshops in response to student feedback about my constant negative comments about their writing style and the poor layout of their reports. My response is that basic business writing skills are essential in the world of professional work you are aspiring to enter. A poorly presented report will be thrown in the bin by a busy manager within 30 seconds; an unreadable report will get you fired fairly quickly! Good professionals never stop learning how to be better at writing effective professional reports. There is a large number of “how to write effective business reports” books available—you will find a bunch of them in the e-Reading List for this unit and a whole lot more in the University library for you to use—and they all approach the business of report writing from a different angle. This workshop shows a simple—even minimalist—style of report writing that you will find useful and easy to follow. There are many other approaches to report writing that also work, but I am just showing a quick and easy way to improve your marks at University. Let me be clear: I am not demanding professionally written reports from you, although if you do already have those skills then great, you will get the good marks you deserve. However, if you don’t already have those skills, you will find this workshop very helpful. I do demand that you submit a basic style of report that is easy to read and assess. Let us now start off with a quick tour of what a business report might look like. The components of a business report A basic business report has a simple layout. This layout will vary according to the business you are in, the style of the report and the audience. A report on the results of a research project will have a different layout to one that explains whether or not a factory should be closed. The layout explained in this workshop will be satisfactory for your assignment and can be re-used in many professional situations. All business reports follow a basic three-part structure that can be represented in different ways. Basic 1-2-3 structure is as follows: Tell them what you are about to tell them (executive summary and introduction)Tell them what you need to tell them (report body)Tell them what you just told them (conclusion and recommendations). This simple three-part structure is used at many different levels within the report. You will see that easy to read reports use this same structure whenever the report is broken into major headings and sub-headings. Each of these sub-sections of a report are mini reports and should follow the same basic 1-2-3 approach. We will meet this in the second workshop on how to design a clear and logical progression for your report. The 1-2-3 approach occurs at a more detailed level, and this might surprise you! Good paragraphs can be structured in the same way. We can be more creative with paragraphs, but if you look at the previous paragraph, can you see a 1-2-3 approach? Could you write it better with a clearer use of 1-2-3? I’ll bet you could, but we will address this in more detail in the third workshop on how to structure good, logical paragraphs. Where should you start writing your report? This might seem like a paradox, given that I have just been explaining how a report follows a neat 1-2-3 sequence, but the best place to start a report is not at the start. Start working on what you need to tell them (step 2). Steps 1 and 3 depend on what you say in Step 2, so write your report body first. Once you are happy with the result (after much revision and re-writing), your report will speak for itself, easily and clearly. Steps 1 and 3 almost write themselves at this point, but you still need to write them using effective paragraphs and good words. However, since the introduction and conclusion are simply summaries of what is in the report body, here is an important rule: no references in the executive summary, introduction, or conclusion please! An important rule: no references in the executive summary, introduction, or conclusion please What a strange rule, you might think. But it is logical: everything that needs a reference must be in the report body. You are only summarising what is in the report body in Steps 1 & 3, so that means that you are not introducing new ideas or statements. That means that no references are needed. If you need a reference, then you are introducing new ideas that are not covered in the report body and you are breaking the 1-2-3 approach. So no references are needed in steps 1 and 3. What can you do now? Locate the e-Reading List in your Moodle site, or click here. Look through the many free online resources I have found for you that can help you with your writing.If these don’t appear to be useful, search the Library site yourself for full-text books. You will find many of them. They don’t have to be recent publications—the art of writing good reports is a timeless art and people have been writing about it for a long time. There are many different approaches to achieving a good report, so you should find an approach that works for you. What’s coming in the next workshop? Next week we will look at how you can break up Step 2 of the 1-2-3 approach into an outline, or skeleton of your eventual report. This is what you will be discussing in your group for Assessment 1. 991 words Permalink Part II: Outlining your report body by Gerard Ilott – Monday, 15 March 2021, 10:25 AM Gerard’s report writing workshop Part II: Outlining your report body Welcome Welcome to the second part of this little report writing workshop. Report writing is a part of a broader style of writing that is called expository writing. Expository writing exposes facts or explains concepts. It is different from other forms, such as technical and creative writing, but it still requires a strong structure to make its central point, or argument clear to the reader. This week we will look at how to outline your report. An outline is a simple skill of jotting down the key points of what you want to cover in your report. An outline can be no more than a series of dot points (bullets), which is what we are going to do for our first report outline. When you are ready, we will look at moving deeper into your outline. Many of your initial dot points can become headings; each heading will contain its own outline, which will be indented. By the time you finish you will have lots of headings and subheadings, but that is OK. Once you are convinced that the report topics and key points flow logically, you can delete most of those headings when you write your report. Let us now start on our journey of outlining. Expository writing: Laying out the key argument A wise person once told me that there was no such thing as “good academic writing”, or “good business writing”, or “good creative writing”: there was just good writing. That’s quite a statement! These different types of writing have different objectives and vastly different audiences, and therefore they have different rules or approaches on how to be “good”. Nevertheless, they all have key aspects in common, such as: Good writing uses plain, simple language. No jargon or big words, please.Good writing is clear and easy to follow; the reader can easily discern the central theme of what is being written about.Good writing brings the reader into the story. The best writers make the reader feel that there is a personal conversation happening between the reader and the writer, even if they have never met! These are good points to consider, but they don’t always hold true. Academic research papers, especially in the sciences and psychology, are necessarily written for people with similar skills and knowledge as the writer and are therefore dense with jargon and technical points that the average reader cannot understand. Some business and engineering reports can be like this too: out of necessity they need to (quickly and efficiently) tell decision-makers (with a prerequisite skill set) what they need to do. Similarly, creative writers and poets are free to break any rules of structure they wish. Sometimes this means that their writing is unreadable to the average person. Yet, their works can be considered classics: James Joyce’s Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels ever written, but I dare you to try to progress past page 2! On the other hand, the Harry Potter books are well-structured, sue simple language and are a delight for anyone to read. Expository writing, unlike creative writing, needs to convince the reader to do something, such as change their mind about a controversial topic, approve a project, or just agree with an argument. This workshop shows you how to use a simple structuring technique called an outline to set out your report in a clear way, simple and provides the reader with everything they need to do what you want them to do. Before we start, a quick warning. The word “simple” will be used a lot. These outlines are simple, as you will see: simple to write and simple to read. Creating them is not simple. Their simplicity makes them difficult to create, and so it is best to start with an outline before you start writing your report. This is what we call, in Queensland vernacular, “getting your ducks in a row” before you start. It means that you get your ideas, your tools, and an idea of what you want the reader to do in place before you actually start writing your report. The high-level outline Here is my motivation for writing this series of workshops: Business graduates need good writing skills.Employers reward good writing skills and punish poor writing skills.However, many of my students don’t have good writing skills and I have to mark poorly written assignments.Therefore, I should provide a quick workshop on report writing skills so that my students can improve, and I won’t have to mark so many poor assignments. OK, it is a little clunky, but that is essentially an outline. If I had to write a report to my Dean justifying this workshop, that is what the outline of the report would look like. Like I said before, it is simple. Or is it? It takes a while before you can lay out a simple outline like this. Before you can develop an effective outline, you must know: What the basic facts of the issue are (points 1, 2 and 3 of my outline above)What the problem is (point 3), andWhat I propose to do about it (point 4). How do you know if you have a good high-level outline? Let’s review that outline I set out above. If you take away the bullets and join up the statements, you have a valid paragraph! Therefore, the first indicator that you have a good high-level outline is that the paragraph is in the form that you want. In this case, the paragraph is in a logical argument form: Present the reader with facts they need to knowPresent the problem that the report is addressing (the sentence starts with “However…)Propose a solution (the sentence starts with “Therefore…). If you can start your report writing preparation with a high-level outline that can form a classic argument as a paragraph, you are on track to move to the next level. It is likely from this point that your report will be cohesive and much easier to read than if you had never done this little exercise. Ask someone to read your little outline—if you have done a good job, the reader will know straight away what you are going to write about, and will probably have a good idea of what your report will contain. Here is a little exercise. Exercise in reading an outline Read this outline and post your thoughts on what the report might be recommending (fill in the “Therefore…” statement) and what you might expect it to contain: Smoking is a massive public health issueTobacco companies don’t really care about thisMany people feel that tobacco should be declared illegalHowever, tobacco companies pay billions in company tax each year to the government, which our health system needsTherefore… The structured outline OK, so now you have a simple outline of your report that reads like a paragraph. In fact, it is a paragraph. What do you do with it now? You progress with it into a structured outline. A structured outline takes the simple high-level outline and expands it using headings and indented lines to signify sub-sections of a report. Each time a line is further indented, a new level of heading is added to accommodate it. Structured outlines are often referred to as skeleton outlines because you can see the bare bones of a report starting to appear. Now let us return briefly to the first workshop. Each section and subsection of a report should follow the 1-2-3 steps. That means there should be some form of an introduction (usually just a paragraph is needed), a body (as many paragraphs as you need) and a conclusion (usually just one paragraph) to wrap up the section for the reader and summarise the key points. A suggested plan for headings and sub-headings Consider this for your report, although you do not have to follow my suggestion: Level 1 = Report TitleLevel 2 = Major sections (Abstract, Introduction, Title for report body, Conclusion and recommendations)Level 3 = Headings within the report body (no headings or subheadings in any of the other major sections)Level 4 = Sub-heading within the Level 3 headingsLevel 5 and below: Delete the headings from the structured outline. Your narrative should be flowing enough without headings. The level of headers that you include in your report depends on your experience and confidence in writing reports. Experienced writers will write strong paragraphs and will probably only include down to Level 3 headers. Less experienced writers will probably prefer Level 4 sub-headings. I will leave the final judgment to you. Try to avoid having Level 5 or beyond sub-headings. Here is an example. Remember the high-level outline about tobacco companies I showed you earlier? If it is expanded into a structured outline, it might look like this one below. Notice how I replace the sentences I used in the high-level outline with short, informative headings for the structured outline. Can you still work out what the report will be about? Actions needed to counter the public health costs of tobacco addiction (Level 1) Abstract (Level 2)Introduction (Level 2)Report: Countering the public health costs of tobacco addiction (Level 2)Tobacco addiction is declining, but not enough (Level 3)An ageing population passes health costs on to future generations to pay (Level 3)Tobacco companies stop pretending to care and rely on addiction rates for business (Level 3)Government reliance on taxes from tobacco companies to fund public health (Level 3)Do increased taxes work to reduce smoking rates? (Level 4)A radical new approach to dealing with big tobacco companies (Level 4)Conclusion Level 2 This structured outline still needs work. There are probably too many Level 3 headings; can you identify any that could become Level 4? Nevertheless, this is a good start. This is the kind of outline you need to develop to share with your group for the first assessment. It will then form your report for the second assessment. Because you are not yet required to write the Introduction, a later workshop will consider a special structure you could use to make sure that the introduction really works for you. What tools can I use? Microsoft Word has its own outliner built right in. Here is a useful guide to using it. There are also many outliner apps available for Windows and Apple, ranging from the free and simple to the expensive and complex. I use a Mac for my writing and I use OmniOutliner, which was the first app I ever bought when I started using a Mac in 2012. You don’t have to use this, as it is rather expensive. Try doing a search for the free and cheap apps on your preferred platform if you want a simpler outliner than what Word provides. A good outliner makes it simple to write your ideas down and move on to the next idea. Outliners, and their close cousin, the mind mapping app, are great for dumping down ideas and thoughts. You can then go back later and rearrange them into a sensible order (and re-rearrange as many times as you need to). The key aspects of a good outliner are: Quick to enter textQuick to move to the next idea (represented as a line), usually by just hitting the key and keep typingEasy to indent and outdent. An indent might just move the active line in, which will turn the line above into a subheading. An outdent occurs when you move that line back out. The best way to road test an outliner is to just get in and use it. For most people, MS Word’s outliner is all they need. You can then reformat that outline into your report, with structured headings already in place. Bonus! The next workshop The next workshop will look at how to write good paragraphs and will conclude with tips for your Introduction. 2002 words Permalink Discuss this topic (0 replies so far)