The Business Report
Reports are aspecially important as a means of gaining and giving information.Essential Qualities
Report-writing is a specialized form of communication and its cardinal merits, like those in business letter-writing, are clarity, brevity, and strict accuracy.
Clarity
Your report must be crystal clear. Clear writing is the product of clear thinking; if you don’t think clearly you can’t write clearly.
Completeness and accuracy
Whether the report is routine or special, short or long, it must be both complete and accurate. A course of action based on incomplete or inaccurate information may well prove to be a costly business.
Tone
The tone for a report is more formal than that for the business letter. It is therefore customary to write in the impersonal third person, except when the report is the account of an eye-witness or is made in letter form.
Planning the Report
Planning the report will often be a much lengthier and more complex, document involving collection, assembly, selection, logical arrangement and interpretation of material from which conclusions are drawn and recommendations sometimes made.
Assembly and selection
Every report has its own special requirements, but certain sources of information are common to all and the extent to which each is used will vary with the nature of the report and the kind of information it calls for.
Organizations and presentation Collecting and assembling relevant information is the foundation of all good report-writing.
Stucture of the Report
Short Reports
In short report it is customaryto arrange items in the following order:
a. Terms of references;
b. Investigation procedure adopted;
c. Findings;
d. Conclusion drawn;
e. Recommendations; if these are required.
Detailed Reports
a. A title page
b. A table of contents
c. A synopsis
d. The body of the report, sectionalized under headings and sub-headings consisting of:
i. An introdution
ii. Investigation methods adopted
iii. Findings
iv. Conclusions drawn
v. Recommendations
e. Acknowledgements
f. Appendixes
Checking the Report
When completed, the draft of the report should be carefully checked to make sure that the facts, and especially figures, are correctly quoted and that the language used flows easily and smoothly and is unmistakably clear.
Forms of Presentation
Reports in letter form
Short reports dealing with subject-matter that is simple and straighforward are often made in letter form. Reports in this form take on the guise of business letters.
Reports in tabular form
Where the material is complex and detailed the letter form of report is not suitable, and in lengthy report it becomes necessary to adopt a tabular or shematic arrangement in which subject-matter is classified and grouped in sections under headings and subheadings, with still further subdivisions if the material lends itself to this.
Reports in paragraph form
Not all reports are long enough or detailed enough to call for five-point headings; four, or even three are probably more usual. For very long reports it is sometimes better to follow the simpler arrangement of numbered paragraphs grouped under section headings.
The Memorandum
As defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary a memorandum is “a note to help the memory”, and in commerce as “an informal communication, especially one on paper headed with the word Memorandum”. The memorandum is an informal document and, unlike the business letter, bears no iniside name and address, no salutation and no complimentary close. Handwritten memoranda are frequently used for giving instruction and conveying routine messages.
