Table of Contents

Contents Praise for Report Writing 3 Dedication 4 About the Author: Dr Margaret Greenhall 5 Executive Summary for Report Writing Skills Training Course 6 Flow chart for writing a report 8 Chapter 1: What makes an excellent report? 12 Components of an excellent report 13 Objectives for Reports 16 Agreeing the Objective 24 Chapter 2: Planning and Resources for your Report 28 Brain Writing 29 Method 1: File card frenzy 30 Method 2: Sun diagram and mindmap 33 What resources do you need? 38 Reading the information: 42 Chapter 3: Organizing your Report 46 Getting the report into the right order 46 Information reports 48 Research reports 56 Proposal reports 59 Chapter 4: Presentation of the Report 66 Making your report memorable 66 Layout style 71 Writing good English 77 Chapter 5: The Finishing Touches 80 Editing the report 81 Writing the executive summary or abstract 82 Contents and index 83 Proofreading 84 Printing and finishing 87 Checklist for the stages of writing the report 89 Action Plan 92 Further resources and reading 94 About the publishers: UoLearn.com 97

About the Author

About the Author: Dr Margaret Greenhall Margaret was a chemistry lecturer for eight years and it was during this time that she was asked to teach the foundation study skills to the new students. This started her interest in how people learn and how the learning environment can help them learn better. She also was involved in educating adults through the access to science course and a special project for the millennium where she helped people discover an interest in science by wading in a river and catching plastic ducks. She moved to staff development and again learned more about how people share information with each other. She then moved to an administrative role at the University of Manchester and was suddenly confronted with tasks that she'd never done before. One of these was to write reports that went to the highest level of the university, the vice chancellors. This was scary, people assumed that coming from a highly professional background that she would know what to do. This got her investigating how to write reports and she realized that this connected with many of the skills she'd worked on with her students about taking in and sharing information. In 2003 Margaret left the university to start a training business, specializing in helping people to understand and share information easily and efficiently. This includes topics such as speed reading, improve your memory, creative problem solving and report writing. This book on report writing combines and shares the unique style of creative planning and sharing information. Margaret can be contacted at www.inspirachange.co.uk, trainer@inspirachange.co.uk

Reviews

Very useful, it has given me a great number of useful tips and information. This will help me to organize and structure my work in a logical way. I will now have a structure to use when preparing future reports and I will feel much more confident in doing this. I now understand how important preparation is when writing a report. The list of eight questions is fantastic, I will always use this for my reports from now on. Very informative and useful. These techniques can be applied in my work straight away. Extremely interesting and useful - vital preparation if you need to write reports for work. Very easy to take back into the work environment.